But My Gallery Is In No Danger Of Being Copied At Present.
Three years
since, I met an artist in the stony bed of a brook, between a line of
300 graven, lichened godlings and a flaming bank of azaleas, swearing
horribly.
He had been trying to paint one of my pictures - nothing more
than a big water-worn rock tufted with flowers and a snow-capped hill
for background. Most naturally he failed, because there happened to be
absolutely no perspective in the thing, and he was pulling the lines
about to make some for home consumption. No man can put the contents of
a gallon jar into a pint mug. The protests of all uncomfortably-crowded
mugs since the world began have settled that long ago, and have given us
the working theories, devised by imperfect instruments for imperfect
instruments, which are called Rules of Art.
Luckily, those who painted my gallery were born before man. Therefore,
my pictures, instead of being boxed up by lumbering bars of gold, are
disposed generously between latitudes, equinoxes, monsoons, and the
like, and, making all allowance for an owner's partiality, they are
really not so bad.
'Down in the South where the ships never go' - between the heel of New
Zealand and the South Pole, there is a sea-piece showing a steamer
trying to come round in the trough of a big beam sea. The wet light of
the day's end comes more from the water than the sky, and the waves are
colourless through the haze of the rain, all but two or three blind
sea-horses swinging out of the mist on the ship's dripping weather side.
A lamp is lighted in the wheel-house; so one patch of yellow light falls
on the green-painted pistons of the steering gear as they snatch up the
rudder-chains.
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