An Evening in the Classroom

Notes Taken by Miss Taylor in One of the Classes of Painting

Harvey Dunn

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780486841496
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Teaching Art

"Dunn, in his teaching, was more concerned with the essential spirit of work than with technical procedures. He never taught what kind of brushes or what kind of paint to use. It was merely whether the result had anything in common with the excitement of human existence." — Dean Cornwell, "the Dean of Illustrators" Illustrator and painter Harvey Dunn was deeply influenced byHoward Pyle andthe teaching he received while at his school.Pyle's Brandywine students became some of the most important and well-regarded artists of the twentieth century, including N. C. Wyeth, Frank Schoonover, Violet Oakley, and Jessie Willcox Smith. All studied alongside Dunn, and many of them would go on to teach. Dunn embraced Pyle's approach as an instructor and went on to influence the next generation of artists.
During the course of an evening in 1934, while Dunn was teaching at Grand Central School of the Arts, one Miss Taylor, a witness to the class, recorded his comments and criticisms. These notes later surfaced in a slim, limited-edition volume. Enhanced by Dunn's striking woodcut images, the book provides a flavorful re-creation of the atmosphere in his classroom. An Evening in the Classroom is the best-preserved record of Dunn's critiques, and this handsome hardcover book will instruct and inspire artists, teachers and students, and art historians.

9 P.M.

TAKE the kind of picture you’ve always wanted to do and see. Tackle something you know darn well you can’t do—and by golly you’ll do it! Don’t think you’ve got to know a lot more before you can do something good. The best picture you make, you deserve the least credit for. When you make a really swell picture, you don’t go around with your chest thrown out, I’ll bet. No; you say: “How do you suppose that happened? I was around when it took place, but I don’t know how.” Your good pictures belong to the world. The bad ones are all yours. When you got into this one, you probably thought: “I guess I don’t know enough to do this.” It isn’t that at all. It’s that you’ve left the idea you started with. You started transcribing Nature, and Nature has nothing to do with pictures. Make use of nature, but don’t let it use you. Yes, I know that it hangs on like death to a mummy! Let your figures be unconscious of their audience. If she turned her head up, alright. But if you turned it up, it won’t do.

As long as you hold on to your statement of light and dark and of values, you can run the gamut of color any way you like. You must have a little more finesse. Don’t make one picture do everything.

Avoid the unusual and far-fetched. We wish to live lives like others’ lives. Do the usual thing and do it obviously with all the artistry in you, and it will be just as artistic and individual as you are.

When a man’s careless, it means he doesn’t care. That’s an awful indictment. When you say he’s careless, that’s something you feel can be forgiven. But when you say it this way: “He does not care,” that’s unforgivable.

Look up the word substance, and also subject in Webster’s (a great book).

This looks like a fragment because the picture is not so designed as to lead to a centre. In every group of people there’s a centre of interest. There should always be a lion. Design the canvas so that strong lines lead you. There’s as much activity in a crowd like this as there would be in a horse race. Action in a picture is the muscular action in the eye of the beholder. It should be so designed that the eye is leaping here and there, all over, and the onlooker says: “It has action.” Yours is silent when it should be noisy with small talk and laughter. The fewer spots you have in the picture the better. You know you can have a dozen people in one spot. One form, but a regular centipede of people. Join them—in conversation.

If you want to be clever, don’t let anybody catch you at it. If they catch you at it, you’re not clever.

If you make the rest flat, make the head as round as a berry.

I repeat and repeat. Yet there’s little to say. Little to know to make pictures. But that little seems very hidden from those who need it.

I try to find an entrance into your minds. Reminds me of the time we stopped for lunch at a very nice teahouse along the way, and Jerry the dog was left outside. First thing we knew, he was wagging his tail beside us, and no one knew what hidden entrance he had found to get to us. But he had hunted around, trying all the doors and finally found him a loophole to get in. I’m doing my best to find a little unguarded entrance into your minds, to get you the few simple ideas necessary.

Try and make your picture so that a single word, or at any rate very few words, would be its title.

You haven’t got to make pictures different. They’re bound to be different because you make them.

If you’re going to make a picture of a fortuneteller, concentrate on the idea of the fortune-teller. Surround her with all the darkness and mystery that those people seek to surround themselves with.

Picture-making is like flying—you get off field and go straight for the place you want to go. It’s like shooting, too. You don’t hear of rifles that the owners brag about as being a very fancy shooter—shoots in a arc of eighty degrees. No. They advertise rifles as being trued-up. You aim straight at the target and then slightly contract your hand—and it’s bound to hit somewhere in a very evident manner. Don’t be like the old man who couldn’t understand why everyone should be so alarmed because: “He pulled the trigger as softly as he could.” Get the idea in mind. Picture it strongly. And shoot right at it.

The idea is not to “simplify” a picture. Keep your thoughts about it simple.

I wish you weren’t so far-fetched. Think pictures more and thoughts less. Take a usual situation and make an unusual picture. Because unless it’s usual, people won’t understand it and people won’t like it because it doesn’t feed their egotism. A man takes it as a compliment to himself if he understands your picture immediately. Here the confusion of ideas works against our seeing the excellence of the work. Take something obvious and present it unusually and dramatically.

Usually I take two or three days on a picture, getting my facts in. Like a foundation of form and effect to the building. Then I tear into it. You’re likely to keep it comprehensible that way. If you had gotten the head round, you could have painted the coat and vest with a few swipes of the brush, and it would have been perfectly adequate. Form is relative. Instead of thinking so much, let down the portals of your mind and look at it. You’ll see this old fellow, leathery skin, wrinkles, and you’ll see the way the skin is drawn over his bald skull, and so on, and how swell it would be; then you’d know just how dark to make the coat...But you didn’t know it here. Make no effort to be artistic. Truth is stranger than fiction. Tell the truth about it. Make the man’s head solid, and don’t you care what you have to do to make it that way.

In a thing so delicate as Spring, be careful about the shadows. I’d like to see you develop this, show that you see it’s more spirit than matter. Paint with the strength of a crowbar and the lightness of a feather. Love is never forgetful of loveliness.

Don’t make it necessary to ask questions about your picture. Howard Pyle used to say it’s utterly impossible for you to go to all the newsstands and explain your pictures.

We see things because of the light that is reflected from, absorbed by, or obstructed by them. Things get their color from light. We see things because they absorb and obstruct and reflect light.

You thought the chap reading the newspaper was the only important thing, so you painted the background so it wouldn’t interfere; and it does interfere. It’s the one thing that draws your attention. Because it’s a false thing. Can’t ever add strength to your picture by adding something negative, untrue. A false note in your picture is like a stone in your shoe. It may be a comfortable shoe, but a little pebble destroys all the comfort. So don’t think you can paint a “tone that won’t interfere.” You’ve got to make it positive, an honest true statement. You don’t like that tone yourself, because it’s negative. And you knew what to do with it but you were too lazy to do it. Be positive from one end of your canvas to another. Otherwise your picture will not be a statement of conviction, and if your picture is not a statement of conviction, there will be no one to look at it.

Art schools teach differently. But I’m telling you the easiest way. And the easiest way of doing a thing is to do it.

It doesn’t seem to me you painted this thing because it was in you, clamoring to get out.

I said to someone who was seeking earnestly to learn what other people know so that he could paint: “I have a picture, and you have a picture, and almost everyone has a picture. So no one needs another. Therefore the only reason for making one is the fun you get out of it. Or the fun you have getting it out of you.” In this I feel too much striving, and wondering if this or that should be this or that way. If, in a flight of fancy, you conceived the idea of a young lady sitting out there in the spring, the bees and birds around, odor of growing things in the air—kind of symbolizing by her being, all the warmth and sweetness of the day, something romantic and colorful, something you appreciate so much you must picture it—then you’ll say to yourself: “I have to spend my time in the studio, but I’m going to go out there in imagination and I’m going to paint the most beautiful girl in the most beautiful spot, lush and living, alive with the buzz of bees and the waving of grass and leaves, etc. T...