旅行的藝術:Ⅷ 對美的擁有-5

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羅斯金認為人人都可拾起畫筆，在這種觀念鼓舞下，我開始在旅程中嘗試著繪畫。關于要畫什么，我想，盡可以由著擁有美的渴望來引導，在那些以前想用相機拍下的地方動筆即可。在羅斯金看來，“你的藝術是對某些你所喜歡的東西的贊美。它或許僅僅是對一片貝殼或是一塊石頭的贊美。”

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.'

我決定畫“凡人”旅館里臥室的玻璃窗，一是因為它近在眼前，二是因為在一個明朗的秋日清晨它顯得很迷人。結果如我所料，畫出的東西很糟，但我仍然感覺學到了一些東西。畫一件物體，不論畫得有多糟，我們都會很快從模模糊糊的感覺進到明確的知覺，分析這樣東西的組成部分和特點。因此，“一扇窗”是一堆架子在合適處支撐著玻璃片，是由木條和凹槽組合成的體系，（旅館的窗口是喬治亞式 [3] 的），12塊玻璃看起來像正方形但其實是長方形，窗格涂的是白色的涂漆，但看起來并不像真的白色，而是呈現(xiàn)出灰色、棕灰色、黃色、粉紫色和柔和的綠色，這得取決于光的強度和光線照射在木條上的情況（窗戶的西北角有受潮的痕跡，那里的油漆因此略顯粉紅）。玻璃也不是完全明凈；在玻璃的內部略有瑕疵，有些細小的氣泡，像是結凍了的汽水，玻璃的表面有干了的雨滴的痕跡和玻璃清潔工的抹布不經(jīng)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.

繪畫無情地揭示出了我們先前對于事物真實面目的無知。這里以樹木為例。在《繪畫的元素》的一段論述里，羅斯金借助他的插圖說明，通常我們在動手畫之前想象的樹枝，跟我們更接近地觀察后用紙筆去描繪是有區(qū)別的：“樹干并不是隨意地從這里或那里生長出無規(guī)律的樹枝來占據(jù)各自的位置，而是所有的樹枝分享了一個類似于噴泉的巨大力量。那也就是說，一棵樹大體上的形狀不是像1a，而像1b；所有的粗樹枝都將它們細小的分支向外延伸，形成一個弧度。同時每一根獨立的樹枝的形狀不是2a而是2b，也就是說，類似于一株花椰菜的結構。”

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.'

羅斯金：《枝條》，引自《繪畫的元素》，1857年

在我的一生中，我已經(jīng)見過許多橡樹，但只有在花費了1個小時去畫蘭代爾峽谷中的一棵之后（盡管連小孩見了我畫的東西都會覺得難為情），我才開始了解并記住了橡樹的特征。

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.