All these things should be borne in mind, as you study the characteristics of paintings to learn what they can mean to you beyond the surface which is obvious to any one; or as you work on your own canvas to attain such power or proficiency, such cleverness or facility, as you may conclude it is worth your while to try for.
A picture is made up of many elements. Certain of them are essentially abstract. They must be thought out by a sort of _mental vision without words_. This is the most subtle and intimate part of the picture. These are the means by which the ideal is brought into the picture.
=Line, Mass, and Color.=--Such are the qualities of _line_, dissociated from representation; of _mass_, not as representing external forms; and _color_, considered as a _quality_, not as yet expressed visibly in pigment, nor representing the color of any _thing_. When these elements are combined they may make up such conceptions as proportion, rhythm, repetition, and balance, with all the modifications that may come from still further combination.
It is because these elements are qualities in themselves beautiful that actual objects not beautiful may be made so in a painting, by being treated as _color_ or _line_ or _mass_, and so given place on the canvas, rather than as being of themselves interesting. A face, for instance, may be ugly as a _face_, yet be beautiful as color or light and shade in the picture. These qualities, I say, do not represent--they do not necessarily even exist, except in the mind to which they are the terms of its thought. Nevertheless, they are the soul of the picture. For whatever the subject, or the objects chosen for representation, it is by working out combinations of these elements, through and by means of those objects, that the picture really is made.
The picture, _as a work of art_, is not the representation of objects making up a subject, but a fabric woven of color, line, and mass; of form, proportion, balance, rhythm, and movement, expressed through those actual objects in the picture which give it visible form.
I do not purpose to go deeply into these matters here. Elsewhere, as they bear practically on the subject in hand, as in the chapters on "Composition" and on "Color," I shall speak of them more fully. But I wish here to call attention to this abstract side of painting in order to show the relation between the two classes of things, the one abstract and the other concrete, which together are needed to make up a picture.