Work methods in biographies

[Mari DeRuntz]

As a followup, more along the lines of the poetry behind an artist, I cannot speak highly enough of Charles Richard Cammell's, "The Memoirs of Annigoni," which through the internet can still be found for under $10, even though it's out of print.

I had a hard time selecting an excerpt, because the book is rich with both eloquent biography and entire sections of philosophy straight from Annigoni's own hand. This, from his hand:

"Again: In my opinion the concept fo drawing generally entertained is mistaken from the start. According to criticisms from contemporary painters, drawing would seem to be an isolated element with exclusively incidental and transitory characteristics, or a purely subsidiary one which one may take of leave at pleasure. But I hold that painting cannot exist without drawing, and that in every case it is the drawing that gives the exact measure of the painter. Drawing never fails, but often the artist does."

More along the lines of materials:

The most essential part of the completion of a picture by the Old Masters was comprised in light touches, and above all in the use of innumerable glazes, either in the details or in the general effect--glazes often mixed even in the final layers of varnish. Now, I do not say that one should not clean off crusts of dirt, and sometimes even recent coats fo varnish, coarsely applied and dangerous, but I maintain that to proceed further than that, and the pretend to remount the past years, separating one layer from another, till one arrives at what is mistakenly supposed to be the original state of the work, is to commit a crime, not of insensibility alone, but of enormous presumption.

What is interesting in these masterpieces, now in moral danger, is the surface as the master left it--aged, alas! as all things age, but with the magic of the glazes preserved, and wtih those final accents which confer unity, balance, atmosphere, expression --in fact all the most important and moving qualities in a work of art.