Review: “Oil Painting Techniques and Materials” by Harold Speed, 1924, Dover 1987 - Review by John O'Flynn

     

 

     

The winner of this year’s BP National Portrait Award in the UK is a Dutchman – with quite a traditional Dutch painting – in a Cannel 4 interview the Dutchman remarked that he thought this type of painting was in revival.

And the man may have a point…While mainstream visual art meanders along the outer limits of what might constitute “art”, endlessly re-iterating Duchamp’s legacy (it's art because I say it is, and I am an artist),  there is evidence that traditional representational painting has a continuing, perhaps growing, constituency. The attempted revival of the atelier system, in Florence, London, US, etc attests to the market for traditional tuition. It is hard to know where to draw the line. I have met mature students who have given up in exasperation at the idiocy of what passes for fine art education in our third level institutions; but they have been equally put off by the monoculture of the Florentine-type ateliers.  One perhaps just has to face the fact that a tradition has collapsed, that there are many schools of thought out there, and the contemporary student has to mix and match from all the sources that are available.

That is why it is so informative and re-assuring to come across two contemporaneous books like “The Painter in Oil”, by Daniel Parkhurst (reviewed here previously) and the subject of this review “Oil Painting Techniques”, by Harold Speed (1924). Both  books are full of technical advice “from a time before technique became secondary to art,” but they can still address concerns of contemporary realist artists.           

While Parkhurst is firmly of the opinion that the student should avoid all philosophy and concentrate on craft,  Speed opens with some whimsical comment on why the art world was changing so much in the early 20^th Century.  He puts it down to popular mass culture  and the role of shock and comment on same in a crowded marketplace.  On contemporary culture Speed writes of a trend that has only deepened in the intervening period:  

“I am inclined to think every age has the art it deserves”.  We are, he says, gradually substituting the making of money for the making of good things to buy with it. People do not easily recognise superior ability; but they do recognise superior wealth, hence wealth tends  

“to become the standard of value by which ability alone is measured”.    Witness current auction house prices for art.

Like Parkhurst, the style of Steed’s book is of its time, whimsical and sardonic:

“What makes this age more advanced than the Stone Age is not so much any marked difference for the better in the average person , but in the rich heritage of culture and knowledge we possess, which we owe to the superior intelligence of exceptional individuals who have lived since that age. The vigour and directness one finds in good primitive art may be the thing we need in these days, but the scrapping of all the traditions and going back to crude expression, is not the only way of re-inculcating it.”. Here Speed had in mind the contemporary primitivism in say, Picasso’s use and depiction of African masks etc.

Some perceptive and useful insights I took away from the book are: 

We interpret what we see with our sense of touch! Evolutionarily, it is the best way to negotiate the world. When we survey the world with our eyes, (and aided by our movements and our bifocal vision) we see discreet objects, and this is where the predilection in early art, and children’s art, to outline discrete objects when we try to record what we see comes from. This is at variance with our “retinal” image – the pure pattern projected on the back of the eye - which is what was revealed by the science of the eye and the invention of photography in the 19^th Century. The retinal image is composed of an abstract mosaic of colour shapes – and this is what the Impressionists latched onto when they revolutionised the depiction of the visual on canvas. To contrast the two modes of perception, imagine how useful it would be to try to understand the specific architectural details of the facade of Rouen Cathedral using one of Monet’s paintings!

The other construct I found useful owes something to the first: there are three historical phases in colour depiction: “Primitivel”, “Brown School” and “Impressionist”.  Pre-Rennaissance artists outlined the objects in their composition, added local colour and a modicum of shading to suggest three-dimensional form; Renaissance art, and later, developed pictures on a unifying base of brown; rendered the objects in 3D in monochrome light and shade and lastly added local colour. The Impressionist insight was to attempt to render the retinal image in full colour. Speed acknowledges that the underlying hue of the Brown School was a very useful unifying device, something the moderns have yet to succeed in replicating in the new pictoral paradigm, but blue-shadow areas have become useful as a unifying device since Impressionism.

Pictures are best made up of a mosaic of discrete tonal shapes, and he examines Vermeer to illustrate this; however hard edges are to be avoided, and a play with “lost and found” edges gives paintings an enlivening vitality and rhythm.