DESIGN IN RELATION TO USE AND MATERIAL
THE fundamental importance of design, and its claims to consideration, will hardly be disputed, particularly at a time when the advancement of art in its application or relation to industry is so much sought for. There is not a single thing we use but involves this primal necessity of design in some degree, which has not demanded some exercise of human thought, some measure of ingenuity, some kind of plan, to fit it for its purpose, or to commend itself to our sense of beauty. And here it may be said, although art in this sense is generally termed “applied art,” strictly speaking, all forms of art, properly understood, come under this head, and that there is no such thing as unapplied art—or, if there is, we may say then it is not art at all.
The gist of the whole matter lies in this application. Design in all its forms is governed by the relative spirit. In making a design, even of the simplest kind, important considerations and questions immediately arise—questions of scale, of treatment, of material, of position, of use, which finally decide its character; and in the solution of such questions lie at once the business and the success of the designer and craftsman.
Now the first of these considerations is Scale. This is determined by the size of the object or surface we deal with, its use, and its relation to its surroundings: as the relation of the axe-head to its handle, the unit of a pattern, the height and proportions of a chair—what, in short, we may call architectural considerations. Fitness of scale is of course primarily determined in relation to the scale and proportions of man himself, who is naturally the standard and measure by which all work for the use and pleasure of humanity is finally checked. You would not, for instance, carve colossal heads on chair backs; or, on the other hand, try to make a chimney-pot look like a miniature cathedral spire! These, of course, are extreme instances.
There is a certain natural logic and common sense of proportion which keeps us tolerably straight in these matters, while it allows a sufficiently indefinite margin for individual taste and variety of character.
There exist obvious reasons, as well as natural feeling, in favour of decoration intended to be near the eye, or upon objects to be handled or used, being small in scale and finely worked; and though, in that perpetual readjustment and inventive adaptation in the control of the designer there is always scope for variety, behind all he is conscious of the pressure of relative considerations—of natural law, in fact.
Then we come to the great question of Treatment, in which lies folded, as it were, like the flower in the bud, the very virtue and essence of art.
To begin with, the designer, in the application of his art to material and use, has to put away from him the allurements of imitative naturalism, except in so far as they can be made to contribute and be subordinated to the effect and purpose of his work as a whole. He soon perceives the natural cleavage between nature and art—between the accidental picturesqueness of confused detail, broken surface-lights, and shadows, and definite, selected, related, and expressive forms and lines. He may be likened to a child with a handful of wooden letters out of which he has to construct words and sentences. Nature and the history of art is the vast encyclopædia of fact and form and phase out of which the poet and the artist have to choose the materials for their work.
A painter pure and simple is, of course, much less restricted, much less weighted with relative considerations, than the designer, and is at liberty, governed only by the necessary internal relation of his work, to avail himself of effects beyond the scope of the maker of tapestries or mosaics, the painter of glass, or the carver. Yet, curiously enough, in our industrial century the influence of the easel-picture painter has been paramount. He has ridden (I will not say in triumph) over our household furniture, he has trampled on our hearthrugs and carpets, he has left his impress on our napery and antimacassars; his influence, in fact, can be traced from our faience to our fish-slice; and this perhaps because, owing chiefly to industrial and economic conditions, the term art and artist came to be limited to pictorial work and its producer,—since the modern easel-picture painter was until lately the only form of craftsman working independently, and with anything like complete control of his own work.
We are recovering, however, I think. We are realising the difference between pictorial and decorative art, between imitative and constructive design. It will do us no harm, as a corrective to our pictorial excesses, to draw the line very sharply between the two,—to put, metaphorically, the decorative sheep on the one hand, and the pictorial goats on the other. For we must remember there are two sides to art, with distinct aims. They may be characterised as “aspect” and “adaptation”: the one seeking rather to imitate planes and surfaces, accidental lighting, phases and effects; the other constructive, depending on its beauty, on qualities of line and form and tint, unaffected by accidental conditions, seeking typical rather than individual forms, and ornamental rather than realistic results.
The first necessity in designing is Definition. Hence Line is all-important. Let the designer, therefore, in the adaptation of his art, lean upon the staff of line,—line determinative, line emphatic, line delicate, line expressive, line controlling and uniting. It cannot lead him wrong; it will never deceive him. He will always know where he is weak, and where he is indecisive, where he has hesitated, and where he has been confident. It will be the solid framing of his structure—the bones and marrow of his composition.
In line alone, having regard to all its different degrees of tenuity, the designer possesses a means of expression of considerable force and sympathetic range. It lends itself to the most sensitive and delicate definition in a fine pen, pencil, or silver-point drawing, and it is capable of the utmost strength and architectural solidity, as in the emphatic outlines necessary to express the pattern and bring out the qualities of the material in large mosaic decorations and stained glass; where, too, other considerations come in, as the tesseræ (Fig. 2) of the one, and the lead lines (Fig. 1) and colour scheme in the other.
Fig. 1. Fig. 2.
And here we come to another essential element in designing: we cannot touch what may be called the exigencies of particular materials, or begin to define our cartoon or pattern in line without perceiving the necessity of proceeding upon some kind of system in the treatment of form and detail.
In purely pictorial work, of course, this is not felt to the same degree, though the necessity is present even there, since we cannot work with Nature’s own materials. We cannot dip our brush in liquid sunshine on the one hand, or have the blackness of night upon our palette on the other. We have not her greens or her reds, and gold and blue, in our boxes; we cannot command the full colours of the sunset or the dawn; so that with the most uncompromising realist the result is after all a compromise, a question of translation, adjustment to a scale, and more or less figurative expression. The same as regards minuteness of detail. Do we paint for the eye at such and such a distance, the photographic lens, or the microscope? A little nearer or a little farther, and all the conditions are changed. The fact is, as I have said, all art is conditioned; it is only a question of degree, and it is the successful demonstration and determination of these degrees which mark the difference between one kind of art and another, between one artist and another.
There is of course no absolute determination of rules for all cases. There is nothing absolute in art. Art is not science. The way is perpetually open for new experiments, for new expositions, and new adaptations and applications, which makes the pursuit of art in all its forms so peculiarly fascinating, and ever fresh and inspiring.
But to return to the question of System. Now supposing we wanted to make a pattern of a rose for a wall-paper. We might pick one from our garden (if we had one, as indeed every designer ought to have) and sketch it exactly as we found it—a portrait, as near as we could make it, of an individual rose with all its accidental characteristics. Well, we might make an interesting study, certainly, but when we came to apply it we should perceive that it made, however good as a study, a very poor pattern, and its virtue and interest as a drawing would be at once destroyed directly our pictorial rose was repeated—which we should be driven to do. We should practically get the repetition of a more or less shapeless blot, a formal and regular repetition of an informal and naturalistic drawing—a contradiction in terms, in fact. Yet it is a thing that has been attempted over and over again. A sentimental public perhaps likes roses, in season and out of season, and considers perhaps that a rose in any material would, if not smell, at least look as sweet. It may be so, but if it be not sweet and clear in line and disposition, and organic as a pattern, its sweetness is wasted on the desert air of false art and taste and failure in decoration.
Therefore it is that the designer, having regard to the conditions of ornamental effect and relation to use and material, proceeds in a very different way. He finds that a certain formalism is an essential condition of his work, seeing that his aim is to adorn a space pleasantly, to construct a pattern that will bear repetition, or rather demand it, as another essential condition of its existence. He finds therefore that typical and abstract forms are of more value for the purpose than accidental ones; that suggestion is better in decoration than naturalistic or pictorial imitation. He would naturally, in taking a rose as his theme, recur to the primitive and fundamental type—to the simple flower as we see it on the parent stem of the wild rose of our hedges (Fig. 3). With such a type as this he could safely make a diaper or simple sprigged arrangement which would be satisfactory as far as it went (Fig. 4).
Nor, let it be observed, is the designer, in following such principles, departing from nature necessarily. Nay, in his way he may be expressing as much natural truth even as the pictorial artist: as we have seen that truth of aspect is one thing, and truth of construction and detail another; while in following the necessities of adaptation to use and material the designer is only carrying out in the region of art the great principle of Nature herself, which rules through all forms of life,—that necessity of adaptation to conditions, which, as we have learned, has led to the endless variety of development in both plant and animal form that we see on every side.
Fig. 3. Fig. 4.
The necessity of plan in designing next makes itself felt, and is of course very important, and capable of almost any degree of extension and complexity, although designs for extension on walls or hangings generally fall into recognisable classes with different variations. Starting with our diaper, square or diagonal, which may be considered the simplest, we may build our pattern upon a great variety of foundations (Fig. 5). But we shall find it necessary to build upon some plan, as a plan is as essential to a pattern as the skeleton to the human figure, though you may eventually conceal it as much as the skeleton is concealed by the human form, or more, by superadded enrichment, detail, and intricacy. How far to go in this way the nature of the material and its uses will generally decide.
As to colour treatment, again, the best decorative effect does not demand the use of heavy shading or relief. The colours should be pure and fair, and the true local colours of all things should be sought, unaffected by accidental lights and shadows, as if we saw everything in an evenly diffused or flat light.
Fig. 5.
In modelling, or any treatment where the means of expression and ornamental effect is by relief, of course the question is different, though here again the gist of the matter lies in treatment, and there is all the difference in the world between one treatment and another.
Now of course the strictest observance of such principles in designing as I have indicated will not necessarily ensure an interesting pattern, though they would suffice to produce a workable one. Other considerations come in as we advance. Plan involves the consideration of the proportion and relation of our masses, and beauty of silhouette. Draw a figure with a big head, and it at once looks ridiculous (this seems so taken for granted by the many, that comic draughtsmen have subsisted upon it for years), while with a head of the natural proportion it may have grace and dignity. The same principle holds good in ornamental designing, and a beautiful result very largely depends upon a due recognition of the importance of proportions. It does not follow that these proportions are those of nature, as in a naturalistic picture. In a decorative design, to serve our ornamental purpose, one may depart widely from them, as in the relative size of trees and figures and flowers and animals, etc., where there is no approach to naturalistic representation, as in designs for textiles and other things.
Fig. 6.
The important thing to preserve is the relation of masses, the organic and necessary connection arising out of the constructive necessities. In pattern work three proportions are generally felt desirable. You cannot jump at a bound from large to small, therefore an intermediate scale is useful, as in the illustration (Fig. 6). The masses of the tree and the pot are combined by the forms of the birds, and further, by the thin stems and leaves behind.
Silhouette, again, is a very important consideration in designing. It is a very good practice to block out one’s design in silhouette in the first instance, as this will afford the best test of the relations and proportions of its masses possible, and of its variety. One does not seek to arrange a figure exactly symmetrically (as at A, Fig. 7), except under very formal conditions. That at B is felt to be a more agreeable treatment. The more variety in contour, the more beauty we get.
A B
Fig. 7.
The best practice in effective and ornamental use of silhouette is to be found in designing patterns for stencilling, where everything depends upon it. You block out a pattern in flat colour—light on dark, or dark on light—in such a way that it is capable of being cut out of a sheet of card or zinc without breaking, so that by painting over the perforated part, which is the pattern, it is transferred to any ground you desire. Fig. 8 shows two sketches of stencil patterns; the halves to repeat.
Another important consideration in designing is the adequate filling of the space for which your design is intended.
Fig. 8.
Now here again pictorial proclivities have been very misleading. They have led us, in illustrating books for instance, to that inorganic way of loosely vignetting a subject—splashing a landscape upon or across a page without regard to its mechanical conditions, and ignoring its necessary relation to the type. Instances of this kind of treatment are to be found notably in our illustrated magazines of Continental or American origin, which have been setting the fashion in so-called page decoration of late years. But this inorganic, unrelated kind of designing has not confined itself to books. You may find it anywhere and everywhere almost,—dabbed upon fans, dragged across cupboard doors, and generally upset over the unconsidered trifles of everyday life.
I am afraid, too, that something is traceable to Japanese influence. But it does not at all follow that, because a Japanese artist, with his wonderful knowledge of nature and precision of touch, can throw a flowering branch, or bird, or a fish across a sheet of paper, or a panel, with such consummate skill as to delude us into the belief that he has decorated the space, therefore any one, with very inferior powers of draughtsmanship, can go and do likewise with equal éclat. It is somewhat like attempting tightrope dancing before one can walk properly on the ground.
The truth is that all the solid and determinative motives in design are traceable to the influence of architectural style. In the absence of a living style in architecture, the arts of design, which are really its offspring, languish, and lose at once their fitness, monumental dignity, and importance.
For style is strictly the sum of considerations like the foregoing—with individual feeling superadded. It is the quality which collects and concentrates, as it were, the virtue and essence of the past, and fuses it with the present. It consists in that highly selective impulse or instinct which gives an artist’s work its own peculiar and distinctive character, without isolating him or disconnecting him from the work that has gone before, or the work of his own day, so that a great design is in fact a link, or a luminous point or jewel, in a long golden chain, and necessarily dependent upon its continuity.
Style, of course, is a very different thing from what are known as “styles.” It is the difference between the quick and the dead. We can get decorations “in any style” nowadays to order. We can be Ancient Egyptian, or Greek, or Roman, or Pompeian, or Byzantine, or Celtic, or Italian, or German, Gothic or Renaissance, whichever we please, Louis Quatorze or Louis Seize—worse luck,—but none of them seems to please for long, perhaps because their designers and producers are only “pleasing to live,” as is the proverbial fate of those who “live to please.” Ours is the age for masquerading, because we have no particular reality of our own—no style, in short. But we cannot be always masquerading, however amusing it may be once in a while, and whatever superior advantages we possess for getting at the best authorities. The motley and fantastic crowd palls at last, and we are glad to get back to everyday, if plain, habiliments, wherein we can at least feel at home.
It is this feeling “at home,” too—which is so important in design—which marks the difference between artist and archæologist. Ease and mastery of expression in any material is the aim of the designer, while keeping strictly within the limitations of that material.
In making a working drawing the designer should be mentally, if not actually, the craftsman also: the conditions and necessities of the material ever present to his mind; its very limitations suggesting new motives, and stimulating invention, as it never fails to do when the designer and the craftsman are one.
So, too, where there has been no conscious aim at decorative beauty, we find beauty of result, at least as regards the all-important quality of line, which goes to prove that organic lines, or lines of construction, at least where the construction is simple and evident to the eye, are usually beautiful lines, as in the sickle, the scythe, plough, ship, bridge, and wagon, for instance, and that this relation to material and use is a fundamental and necessary quality of all design.
Mistakes are usually made in the attempts to beautify by superadded ornament, unrelated to the object, use, and material, instead of treating it as a natural outgrowth, so that the absence of ornament is preferable to ornament not beautiful, or to ornament, however beautiful in itself, which does not decorate. And indeed, unless ornament is organic in this sense, we had much better be without it, and trust to the simple beauty of constructional lines alone.
Now this decline of organic design, it can hardly be doubted, is traceable in a great measure to the economic conditions and the development of machine industry in the interests of a commercial system of centralisation and a world-market which have characterised our century, and which have succeeded the system of division of labour developed in the last, as that succeeded, as Mr. Morris has often pointed out, the older system of local production for use; and this because its effect has been to separate the designer and the craftsman, and to turn both more or less into machines. The effect of this is to throw the designer out of sympathy with the use and material of his design, to cut him off from the suggestive and inventive stimulus of the material, while, under the pressure of competition, forcing him to the constant production of so-called novelties, while it turns the craftsman or mechanic into an indifferent tool. The results are precisely what might have been expected, and what we have seen. In fact, the only wonder is they are not worse; but humanity has always been better than its systems.
As to the craftsman, the workman, he, perhaps, relegated to the performance of one monotonous function—a unit in a long sum of industrial production,—becomes but a part of a machine, his personality merged in the general description of “hands” (a designation, by the way, which does not encourage the development of brains), and, in short, all personal interest and identity with his work as a whole taken away, and leaving him with no prospect of winning public and personal appreciation—even if a “forty-thousandth part,” as Carlyle would have said, of a product could reasonably hope to win such things—since all credit for the finished result is practically claimed by the employer.
These things being so, I say it is not wonderful our “industrial art,” as we call it, is what it is.
What then should we aim at? If this is the real condition of affairs, what is the ideal? For unless we consider we are living under the best possible arrangements—social, political, and industrial—we must entertain an ideal of some sort, even if it be a stranger, like an angel unawares.
Well, then, if so far you are disposed to agree with me (firstly) as to the necessary conditions and considerations for the production of well-designed decorations and accessories of daily life, from the roof which shelters us to the cup we drink out of; (secondly) as to the relation of the designer and producer of these necessities—for I claim that beautiful things are a necessity of any reasonable and refined human life; and (thirdly) as to the condition of the producer of such things himself,—then we shall have reached the conclusion that for the production of beautiful and thoughtful work you must have conditions of life wherein beauty and thought have opportunity to germinate and grow naturally, and as a matter of course, out of the conditions of daily life and work, as naturally as the apple-tree blooms in the spring. But this means no less than that the conditions of health and refinement, of a vigorous and full if simple life, be open to all, both men and women, without distinction; and before such conditions can be realised it evidently implies that something like fundamental changes must take place in the constitution of society.
Then it comes to this, that all we have to make up our minds about are two things:—(1) Whether we consider art as an utterly unrelated, individual, and accidental matter; or (2) whether we consider it and its beautiful results as the highest outcome of life, and as necessarily dependent upon the character, ideals, and conditions of that life. If the latter, then it may be worth while to take such steps as may be within our power and mental vision to co-operate towards the realisation of such a life and such an ideal, which, strange and roundabout a method as it appears, will yet prove the shortest way to our goal, namely, a true revival of design in its relation to material and use.