A drawing is not necessarily academic because it is thorough, but only because it is dead.  Neither is a drawing necessarily academic because it is done in what is called a conventional style, any more than it is good because it is done in an unconventional style.  The test is whether it has life and conveys genuine feeling.

* * * * *

There is much foolish talk about conventional art, as if art could ever get away from conventions, if it would.  The convention will be more natural or more abstract according to the nature of the thing to be conveyed and the medium employed to express it.  But naturalism is just as much a convention as any of the other isms that art has lately been so assailed with.  For a really unconventional art there is Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks.  There, even the convention of a frame and flat surface are done away with, besides the painted symbols to represent things.  They have real natural chairs, tables, and floors, real clothes, and even real hair.  Realism everywhere, but no life.  And we all know the result.  There is more expression of life in a few lines scribbled on paper by a good artist than in all the reality of the popular show.

It would seem that, after a certain point, the nearer your picture approaches the actual illusion of natural appearance, the further you are from the expression of life.  One can never hope to surpass the illusionary appearance of a #tableau vivant#.  There you have real, living people.  But what an awful deathlike stillness is felt when the curtain is drawn aside.  The nearer you approach the actual in all its completeness, the more evident is the lack of that #movement# which always accompanies life.  You cannot express life by copying laboriously natural appearances.  Those things in the appearance that convey vital expression and are capable of being translated into the medium he is working with, have to be sought by the artist, and the painted symbols of his picture made accordingly.  This lack of the movement of life is never noticed in a good picture, on the other hand the figures are often felt to move.

Pictures are blamed for being conventional when it is lack of vitality that is the trouble.  If the convention adopted has not been vitalised by the emotion that is the reason of the painting, it will, of course, be a lifeless affair.  But however abstract and unnaturalistic the manner adopted, if it has been truly felt by the artist as the right means of expressing his emotional idea, it will have life and should not be called conventional in the commonly accepted offensive use of the term.

It is only when a painter consciously chooses a manner not his own, which he does not comprehend and is incapable of firing with his own personality, that his picture is ridiculous and conventional in the dead sense.