A great point is gained by starting in a business-like frame of mind. It is a mistaken idea that an artist drifts into painting a picture as a cloud drifts across the sky. To obtain practical results you must start with practical intentions. You must be firm with yourself. You must choose your subject quickly and settle down determinedly, and you must not be too ambitious. Young people balk their efforts by attempting subjects that are so ambitious that they might well make a practised artist hesitate.
"I should love to paint a field of corn, with poppies and convolvuluses . . . and perhaps a little dip of the sea—and a glimpse of the village church beyond," one will exclaim.
And another will say:
"Let's go on the beach and sketch the harbour, and the boats, and the cliffs. It would be simply topping!"
I admit the attractiveness of such subjects. The very suggestion quickens one's pulses. But the difficulties!
Once upon a time there was a man of most eloquent tongue who wrote about art, and more especially about pictures. He advised artists to take a stone and study that. There's something very interesting in the drawing of an old lichened stone, though it is far from easy. A wise principle of selection, however, is—choose one simple subject rather than a dozen complicated ones.
From the field of corn choose a blade of wheat with perhaps the tendril of a convolvulus creeping up its stalk; a cluster of poppies, a tall grass. If a butterfly flutters near, watch intently the angle of his wings, the exquisite poise of his body, the clutching, delicate strength of the tiny legs, and draw your remembrance of him.
In a meadow-land of gold and silver, where cows are "forty feeding like one," choose a spray of buttercups, a single fine marguerite; take one cow under your observation; make a sketch of a portion of a tree, a gnarled branch, or some twisted roots with an over-curling plume of a fern. Sketch the stile, or the fragment of a paling round which a spray of ivy is climbing.
