Pamela Colman Smith

The teaching

Taught from her pictures and her own words on her art, above all her essay Should the Art Student Think? (1908).

A scene on every card

Her best known work teaches by pictures. Of the seventy-eight cards she drew for Waite's pack, the twenty-two trumps follow the old subjects in the order Waite set, and the forty numbered cards, which most older packs showed only as a count of cups or swords, she gave whole scenes: people at work, in grief, at feast, in a landscape, so that a reader who forgets the book can read the card from its picture. A man bent under ten staves trudges toward a town; a woman stands bound and blindfolded among eight swords; five youths fight with staves. The meanings card by card are taught on the divination art's branch The tarot; what is hers is that the meaning is drawn as a moment of human life.

The stage as a school

She learned to draw such moments in the theatre, and told students to learn there too. Go and see all the plays you can, she wrote, for the stage is a great school to the illustrator: watch first the simple forms of joy, fear and sorrow, the position of the whole body before the face, and then the clothes, the way a cloak swings as its wearer walks, the way the hands are used. The stage, she said, had taught her almost all she knew of clothes, of action and of the gestures that tell in a picture.

Her exercise is plain. Draw a composition of fear, or sadness, or great sorrow, in a few lines and with no detail; show it to a friend and ask what it portrays; when they can tell, put in the face and the dress. A picture must first tell its tale.

The idea in the corner of the mind

Her first counsel to a beginner is to decide early what end they are working for, and to keep that idea in a corner of the mind, calling it up now and then to review the work in front of it. A student who means to paint portraits studies the faces of everyone they see and asks how to show more of a person's character than appears on the surface. A student who looks at an old portrait notes the dress, the face and the pose, fixes its period in memory, and sketches what they cannot place in order to look it up, so that the knowledge is there when a book has to be drawn.

Feel everything

“Learn from everything, see everything, and above all feel everything!” she wrote, and the rest follows from it: make whoever looks at the drawing feel it too. Hear all the music you can, she told students, for sound and form are more closely joined than we know. Think good thoughts of beautiful things, colours, sounds and places; in a crowd of dirty and weary people, look past the dirt to the great spirit in them all and the power they stand for. Through ugliness, she held, beauty is sometimes found.

She ends with a quest. Banish fear, set the ideal high, and use more than the eyes of the body: “Find eyes within, look for the door into the unknown country.” What is sought there is beauty, of thought first, then of feeling, form, colour and sound, and with it the power of showing it to others.

Pictures from music

Her own way through that door was music. She drew while it played, quickly and without a plan, and held that what came were not illustrations of the piece but visions the sound called up, figures and landscapes moving in a light of their own, and she named each picture after the music that brought it. The practice is the essay's teaching made into a method: the ear opens the inner eye, and the hand records what it sees before the mind can correct it.

Anansi

Her first book set down the Jamaican tales of Anansi, which she also told aloud on stage in the speech of their tellers. Anansi is the spider, small and weak among the beasts, who gets the better of Tiger and the rest by wit and talk; yet the trickster is often caught by his own greed, and the tales laugh at him as much as with him. They teach as folk tales do, by letting the listener watch cunning, appetite and pride at work in a creature small enough to laugh at.