Charcoal is the unhampered, the free, the personal individual medium. No water, no oil, no palette, no squeezing of tubes or wiping of tints; no scraping, scumbling, or other dilatory and exasperating necessities. Just a piece of coal, the size of a cigarette, held flat between the thumb and the forefinger, a sheet of paper, and then "let go." Yes, one thing more--care must be taken to have this forefinger fastened to a sure, knowing, and fearless hand, worked by an arm which plays easily and loosely in a ball-socket set firmly near your backbone. To carry out the metaphor, the steam of your enthusiasm, kept in working order by the safety-valve of your experience, and regulated by the ball-governor of your art knowledge--such as composition, drawing, mass, light and dark--is then turned on.
Now you can "let go," and in the fullest sense, or you will never arrive. My own experience has taught me that if an outdoor charcoal sketch, covering and containing all a man can see--and he should neither record nor explain anything more--is not completely finished in two hours it cannot be finished by the same man in two days or two years.
For a drawing in charcoal is really a record of a man's temperament. It represents pre-eminently the personality of the individual--his buoyancy, his perfect health, the quickness of his gestures. All these are shown in the way he strikes his canvas--compelling it to talk back to him. So also does it record the man's timidity, his want of confidence in himself, his fear of spoiling what he has already done, forgetting that a nickel will buy him another sheet of paper.
Courage, too, is a component part--not to be afraid to strike hard and fast, belaboring the canvas as a pugilist belabors an opponent, beating nature into shape.
[Illustration: The George and Vulture Inn, London]
As for the potterer and the niggler, the men and women whose stroke goes no farther back than their knuckles, I may frankly say that charcoal is not for them. The blow is a sledge blow going from the spinal column, not the pitapat of a jeweller's hammer elaborating the repoussé around a goblet.
Remember, too, that the fight is all over in two hours--three at the outside--the battle really won or lost in the first ten minutes, if you only knew it: when you get in your first strokes, really defining your composition and planting your big high light and your big dark. It is all right after that. You can taper off on the little lights and darks, saving your wind, so to speak, sparring for your next supplementary light and dark.