deny the existence of such a thing altogether. Good artists of strong
natural inspiration and simple minds are often quite unconscious of
doing anything when painting, but are all the same as mechanically
accurate as possible.

Yet however much it may be advisable to let yourself go in artistic
work, during your academic training let your aim be #a searching
accuracy#.




III

VISION


It is necessary to say something about Vision in the first place, if we
are to have any grasp of the idea of form.

An act of vision is not so simple a matter as the student who asked her
master if she should "paint nature as she saw nature" would seem to have
thought. And his answer, "Yes, madam, provided you don't see nature as
you paint nature," expressed the first difficulty the student of
painting has to face: the difficulty of learning to see.

Let us roughly examine what we know of vision. Science tells us that all
objects are made visible to us by means of light; and that white light,
by which we see things in what may be called their normal aspect, is
composed of all the colours of the solar spectrum, as may be seen in a