20 
Land & Water 
May 1 6, 191 8 
Building in Paint : By Charles Marriott 
THE time is past, if it was ever due for thinking of 
the artist as an unpractical person engaged in grace- 
fully dodging reality for ornamental purposes. 
Nowadays we judge the ornamental by the amount 
of reality it contains. We recognise, too, that the 
kind of reality suited to any particular art depends upon the 
tools and materials it is done with. 
One of the most interesting and suitable ideas of reality for 
pictorial expression with paint and brushes is that of space in 
three dimensions. For some time after the reaction from 
realism, which was partly due to the recognition that paint and 
brushes are not in it with the camera for that purpose, painters 
" hedged " by putting down their surface impressions of nature 
only, but presently 
they began to want 
something firmer. 
Cezanne expressed the 
desire when he said : 
"I want to make of 
impressionism some- 
thing solid and per- 
manent, like the old 
masters." What it 
amounted to in fact 
was a craving for the 
third dimension. 
Some such prelim- 
inary is necessary to 
explain wliat a painter 
like Mr. J. D. Fergus- 
son, who is now exhi- 
biting at Connell's 
Gallery in Old Bond 
Street, is working at. 
By avoiding realism 
he recovers the free 
and characteristic use 
of paint and brushes, 
liberty of design, and 
the intrinsic value of 
colotir ; but at the 
same time by insisting 
upon the condition of 
deptli, he secures the 
soUdity demanded by 
the Western mind. It 
may be said that he 
could get the same 
result by painting 
realisticall}', but that 
is not true. If you are 
out to create the 
illusion of reality — as 
in a stereoscopic 
photograph^any free- 
dom of brush work, 
any obvious brush- 
work, indeed, must 
disturb the illusion ; 
and it is worth remarking that the earlier painters who 
aimed at realistic illusion, consistently concealed their 
brushwork, and painted very smoothly. Also in realis- 
tic painting yon are severely limited in the matter of design. 
Yuu can arrange or compose reahstically painted objects in a 
striking or pleasing manner, but you cannot really make a 
design of them in paint without straining probabihty — just as 
you would if you wrote a realistic description in formal verse. 
For the same reason you must sacrifice the* intrinsic value of 
colour to descriptive truth. 
You can't have it both ways. The objection to realistic 
painting is not an aesthetic fad. It is as practical as the objec- 
tion to rule of thumb in engineering. The problems of paint- 
ing, indeed, are very much like the problems of engineering. 
You have to make a structure in a definite material that will 
carry your ideas or feelings to the spectator. The methods, 
Uke the burden, may be subtler and more subject to emotion, 
but they are strictly scientific in principle. There is no scope 
forthinking in the world of illusion, it is all a matter of tricks ; 
but in the world of design, there is unhmited scope for thinking. 
Once exchange the illusion for the idea of reality jis an aim, and 
you come into the full freedom of your materials, and you can 
"work out your problems of design instead of merely dodging 
them by pretending — always at risk of probability — that it 
Lamplight and 
By J. D. 
"happened so." Mr. Fergusson can be as "decorative" as 
he likes ; but because he designs in three dimensions instead of, 
like the' Chinese, only in two, he secures the reality that is 
generally sacrificed in decorative painting. It was to express 
the idea of designing in three dimensions that 1 headed this 
article " Building in Paint." 
Mr. Fergusson's paintings o( heads convey the idea of plastic 
relief which is something quite different from the illusion of 
stereoscopic relief produced by realistic painting. They do not 
stick out of their frames, but are closely related to their back- 
grounds or surroundings. In several pictures, ,in "Rose 
Rhytlim," for example, he has carried the same motive 
throughout the design in almost exactly the same way as a 
musical composer 
would construct a 
fugue on a given 
sequence of notes — or 
an engineer would 
carry the cantilever 
I)rinciple throughout 
his bridge, for the 
matter of that. This 
is a thing you could 
not do in realistic 
painting, except by 
pretending accidental 
circumstances of the 
"very like a whale" 
order ; by pretending 
that the young 
woman's mouth or ear 
looked hke a rose in 
certain lights, for 
example. By dealing 
with ideas rather than 
appearances of struc- 
ture, Mr. Fergusson 
has been able to design 
the young woman in 
the rhythm of roses 
without risk of prob- 
ability. Once reduce 
the visible world to the 
same category of ideas 
expressed in terms of 
painting, and you can 
compare and design to 
your heart's content 
without any risk to 
probabihty, or of 
confusion between the 
character of one object 
and another. You do 
not need artistic 
licence. Whether you 
deal with facts or 
fancies you have 
exactly the same 
freedom and security 
as the writer who designs in words, or the composer who 
designs in musical sounds. The nearer you get to the' ideas 
of things, the more you bring out their differences. 
Moreover, as Mr. Fergusson shows, the moment the painter 
has plumped for ideas, instead of imitations of reahty, he can 
combine with ideas of structure, of length, breadth, and depth, 
the more subtle suggestions of surface. One of his pictures has 
for its motive the blondness of a woman. The head is firmly 
constructed in paint, there is no imitation of hair or flesh and 
blood, but the bloom and delicacy of the subject is kept 
throughout. 
But when all has been said, the most striking temperamental 
characteristic expressed in the work of Mr. Fergusson is his 
craving for the third dimension. Obviously he is a man of 
robust imagination, ill content with a vision that evades the 
logic of structure. But being a true painter he will not sacri- 
fice the tools and materials of his craft to realistic imitation 
in order to get the effect of solidity. By reducing everything 
to the same category, and dealing with it in the same terms, he 
is able to combine ideas of structure and emotional sugges- 
tions in a pictorial and decorative manner ; to embodv 
thoughts and feelings "in the round." As might be expected 
of such a painter, he has more than an instinct for sculpture ; 
and the exhibition includes some examples of his work in stone. 
Violet: 
Fergusson 
Ruby 
