Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/132

LANDSCAPE PAINTING horizon line is forcedly horizontal, make this straight line beautiful by adjusting the cloud forms to it in agreeable contrast. The sky is in this respect a wonderful resource to the painter, for its lines may sweep in any one of an hundred different directions; and they can thus always be made to balance or accentuate or modify the lines of the solid earth, which cannot change.

Above all, "don't let the dominant line of your picture end aimlessly in mid-air." With the sky to help, there is no excuse for this. It should be picked up and carried on in a sinuous, living line, like the sweep of a winding brook or the curve of a mountain road. The psychological effect of this living line in a picture is one of the most potent, though one of the most mysterious, things in art.

As I have already said, however, there [96]