旅行的艺术:Ⅷ 对美的拥有-5

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罗斯金认为人人都可拾起画笔，在这种观念鼓舞下，我开始在旅程中尝试着绘画。关于要画什么，我想，尽可以由着拥有美的渴望来引导，在那些以前想用相机拍下的地方动笔即可。在罗斯金看来，“你的艺术是对某些你所喜欢的东西的赞美。它或许仅仅是对一片贝壳或是一块石头的赞美。”

Encouraged by Ruskin's democratic vision of drawing, I tried my hand during my travels. As for what to draw, it seemed sensible to be guided by the desire to possess beauty which had previously led me to take up my camera. In Ruskin's words, 'Your art is to be the praise of something that you love. It may only be the praise of a shell or a stone.'

我决定画“凡人”旅馆里卧室的玻璃窗，一是因为它近在眼前，二是因为在一个明朗的秋日清晨它显得很迷人。结果如我所料，画出的东西很糟，但我仍然感觉学到了一些东西。画一件物体，不论画得有多糟，我们都会很快从模模糊糊的感觉进到明确的知觉，分析这样东西的组成部分和特点。因此，“一扇窗”是一堆架子在合适处支撑着玻璃片，是由木条和凹槽组合成的体系，（旅馆的窗口是乔治亚式 [3] 的），12块玻璃看起来像正方形但其实是长方形，窗格涂的是白色的涂漆，但看起来并不像真的白色，而是呈现出灰色、棕灰色、黄色、粉紫色和柔和的绿色，这得取决于光的强度和光线照射在木条上的情况（窗户的西北角有受潮的痕迹，那里的油漆因此略显粉红）。玻璃也不是完全明净；在玻璃的内部略有瑕疵，有些细小的气泡，像是结冻了的汽水，玻璃的表面有干了的雨滴的痕迹和玻璃清洁工的抹布不经意留下的拭痕。

I decided to draw the bedroom window at the Mortal Man Inn because it was to hand and seemed attractive on a bright autumn morning. The result was a predictable yet instructive disaster. Drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes us from a woolly sense of what it looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities. So 'a window' reveals itself to be made of a succession of ledges holding the glass in place, of a system of ridges and indentations (the hotel's was in the Georgian style), of twelve panes that might seem square but are in fact mildly but importantly rectangular, of white paint that doesn't really look white but ash-grey, brown-grey, yellow, pinky mauve and mild green depending on the light and on the relationship between this light and the condition of the wood (in the north-western edge of the window, a trace of damp gave the paint a pinky tint). Nor is glass wholly clear; it has within it minute imperfections, tiny bubbles of air like a frozen fizzy drink, and on its surface mine had been marked with the traces of dried raindrops and the impatient swipes of a window cleaner's cloth.

绘画无情地揭示出了我们先前对于事物真实面目的无知。这里以树木为例。在《绘画的元素》的一段论述里，罗斯金借助他的插图说明，通常我们在动手画之前想象的树枝，跟我们更接近地观察后用纸笔去描绘是有区别的：“树干并不是随意地从这里或那里生长出无规律的树枝来占据各自的位置，而是所有的树枝分享了一个类似于喷泉的巨大力量。那也就是说，一棵树大体上的形状不是像1a，而像1b；所有的粗树枝都将它们细小的分支向外延伸，形成一个弧度。同时每一根独立的树枝的形状不是2a而是2b，也就是说，类似于一株花椰菜的结构。”

Drawing brutally shows up our previous blindness to the true appearance of things. Consider the case of trees. In a passage in The Elements of Drawing , Ruskin discussed, with reference to his own illustrations, the difference between the way we usually imagine the branches of trees before we draw them and the way they reveal themselves once we have looked more closely with the help of a pad and pencil:'The stem does not merely send off a wild branch here and there to take its own way, but all the branches share in one great fountain-like impulse. That is to say, the general type of a tree is not as 1a but as 1b , in which the boughs all carry their minor divisions right out to the bounding curve. And the type of each separate bough is not 2a but 2b ; approximating, that is to say, to the structure of a plant of broccoli.'

罗斯金：《枝条》，引自《绘画的元素》，1857年

在我的一生中，我已经见过许多橡树，但只有在花费了1个小时去画兰代尔峡谷中的一棵之后（尽管连小孩见了我画的东西都会觉得难为情），我才开始了解并记住了橡树的特征。

I had seen many oak trees in my life, but only after an hour spent drawing one in the Langdale valley (the result would have shamed an infant) did I begin to appreciate, and remember, their identity.