ist discovers how great is the
disparity between art and nature, and what a disproof nature herself is to
the common notion that art is mirrored nature, and that any part of her
drawn or painted will make a picture.
The first stage of the art collector is that in which his admiration
dwells on imitation such as the still-life painter gives him, but soon his
art sense craves an expression with thought in it, the imitation,
brow-beaten into its proper place and the creative instinct of the artist
visible. In other words, he seeks the constructive sense of the man who
paints the picture. "The work of art is an appeal to another mind, and it
cannot draw out more than that mind contains. But to enjoy is, as it
were, to create; to understand is a form of equality."(8) With the horse
before the cart and the artist holding the reins, he gets a fresh start,
and is in a fair way to comprehend Richard Wagner's assertion that you
cannot have art without the man. In the same manner does the student
usually develop. With the book of nature before him he is eager to sit
down anywhere and read, attracted by each separate item of the vast
pattern, but he finds he has opened nature's dictionary and that to make
poetry or even good prose he must put the separate words and phrases
together.
After the first roll of films has been printed and brooded over, the kodac
person is apt to ask in a tone of injured and deceived innocence, "_Well,
what does make_ a picture?"
He with others has supposed it possible to go to nature and, taking
nothing with him, bring something back. Though one does not set out with
the rules of composition, he must at least present himself before nature
with fixed notions of the few requirements which all pictures demand.
Having looked at a counterfeit of her within four sides of a frame and
learned to know why a limited section of her satisfied him by its
completeness he approaches her out of doors with greater prospects of
success than though he had not settled this point. Good art, of the
gallery, is the best guide to a trip afield. Having seen what elements
and what arrangements have proved available in the hands of other men, the
student will not go astray if he seek like forms in nature. Armed with
defininite convictions he will see, through her bewildering meshes the
faithful lines he needs. The star gazer with a quest for the
constellations of the Pleiades or the Great Bear, must close his eyes to
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