(From Harold Speed‘s The Practice and Science of Drawing)
Line rhythm or music depends on the shape of your lines, their relation to each other and their relation to the boundaries of your panel.
In all good work this music of line is in harmony with the subject (the artistic intention) of your picture or drawing. (more…)
Many of us have done our fair share of searching for a definition of “Art”. Some more than others, some with more success than others.
This poem by John Keats is most famous for the following last two lines, generally considered to be linked with the writings of Sir Joshua Reynolds.
This is because the whole technique of allusion, and even short quotation, was fundamental to the neoclassicism in which both Reynolds and his readers had been educated.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
As you have no doubt seen with hieroglyphics, early Egyptian wall paintings were outlines that had tinted colourings, and the earliest known wall sculpture was an incised outline.
After these outlines had been used to convey form for centuries, people gradually began to carve out the surface of the wall between these outlines, modelling in low relief.
Chiaroscuro Study of a Young Woman Facing Away, by Antoine Watteau, from an original drawing in the collection of Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon.
Maybe it was this that suggested to the artist painting their outline to shade between the outlines. This subtle suggestion of form, using an outline that was lightly shaded was the only technique used up until Leonardo, who was the first genius to seriously perceive light and shade.
The visible world is to the artist, as it were, a wonderful garment, at times revealing to them the Beyond, the Inner Truth there is in all things.
They have a consciousness of some correspondence with something the other side of visible things and dimly felt through them, a “still, small voice” which he is impelled to interpret to man.
A Grecian Urn from around 500 B.C.
In the 1819 ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ by John Keats ( read the entire poem here ), the most discussed two lines in all of Keats’s poetry say:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.