Landscape is a good subject for notan‐composition, to be treated at first as a design, afterward as a picture. Its irregular spacings contrast well with the symmetries of pattern, and when tones are played over them the effects are new and strange, stimulating to further research into the mysteries of tone. Such an exercise leads to the appreciation of landscape pictures, and is an introduction to pencil and charcoal sketching from nature, to monotypes and etching.
Notan in landscape, a harmony of tone‐relations, must not be mistaken for light‐and‐shadow which is only one effect or accident. Like all other facts of external nature, light‐and‐shadow must be expressed in art‐form. The student under the spell of the academic dictum “Paint what you see and as you see it” feels that he must put down every accidental shadow “just as it is in nature” or be false to himself and false to art. He finds later that accurate record is good and right in studies or sketches but may be wrong in a picture or illustration. No accidents enter into pictures, but every line, light, and dark must be part of a deliberate design.
Light‐and‐shade is a term referring to modelling or imitation of solidity; the study of it by drawing white casts and still life tends to put attention upon facts rather than upon experience in structure. It does not help one to appreciate tone‐values in pictures. Such drawing is worth while as pure representation and the discipline of it contributes to mastery of technique, but it is absurd to prescribe this or life drawing as a training for the landscape painter. Its influence is only indirect, for modeling is of secondary importance in Painting, the art of two dimensions.
When a painter works for roundness and solidity he enters the province of his brother the sculptor. In typical paintings, like Giotto’s frescoes at Assisi, Masaccio’s “Tribute Money,” Piero della Francesca’s work at Arezzo, the compositions of the Vivarini, the Bellini and Titian, and even the Strozzi portrait by Raphael, the modelling is subordinate to the greater elements of proportion and dark‐and‐light.
In a mural painting extreme roundness is a fatal defect, as illustrated in the Pantheon at Paris, where Puvis de Chavannes and his contemporaries have put pictorial designs upon the walls. Puvis created a mosaic of colored spaces intended to beautify the wall; charm of color and tone, poetry and illusion of landscape possess the beholder long before he even thinks of the special subjects. The other painters made their figures stand out in solid modelling, replacing composition with sculpturesque realities. From these you turn away unsatisfied. I am not arguing for the entire omission of shadows and modelling—they have their place—but am insisting that flat relations of tone and color are of first importance; they are the structural frame, while gradation and shading are the finish. To begin with rounding up forms in light and shade, especially in landscape, is to reverse the natural order, ignore structure, and confuse the mind. The academic system has adopted the word “decorate” for flat tone relations and non‐sculpturesque effects, as if everything not standing out in full relief must belong to decoration. This use of the word is misleading to the student; we do not speak of music and poetry as “decorative”. Lines, tones and colors may be used to decorate something, but they may be simply beautiful in themselves, in which case they are no more decorative than music. This word should be dropped from the art vocabulary.