The beach painters were a familiar sight to the old residents of Provincetown. For thirty odd summers that curious fishing village had witnessed the coming of the art students. Their unconventional costumes, their apparent immunity to broiling heat and their incomprehensible pictures gave no thrill to the permanent residents.

     But new and disconcerting experiences awaited the student making his first pilgrimage to the tip end of Cape Cod. Of course many returned summer after summer but each year brought many newcomers, drawn from far points by the fame of Charles Hawthorne. Many had visions of learning from him the magic of technique-the principles of his design, the subtle secrets of his color mixing. They were coming to Provincetown for post graduate work; for that final polishing which was to complete their training.

     The opening day at Hawthorne's Cape Cod School of Art brought them face to face with disagreeable facts.

     Many of them had been gently discouraged from coming to Provincetown. The local art authority had not actually made disparaging remarks, neither had he been too enthusiastic. He had politely suggested a number of other summer schools they might attend. He had hinted at possible disappointment resulting from a Provincetown pilgrimage. The first day of school made his reasons quite clear.

     The elaborate little paint box, the cherished Rubens brushes, the costly tubes of colors-all seemed appallingly inadequate when the order was transmitted that painting was to be done with a putty knife. Not with a palette knife, although heretofore that had seemed rather course and brutal, but actually with a putty knife and one with a wide blade at that. And the painting was to be done, not on canvas or canvasboard, but on building board. The course sort of substance that is advertised to keep a house warm in the winter and cool in the summer.

     The difficulty of working in this clumsy way became more pronounced during the first week and many complaints were heard. Small groups of indignant spirits would gather in informal protest. It was the consensus opinion that the putty knife might be an excellent instrument for spreading putty but for painting portraits it is an outrage.

     Of course old students were very kind in explaining that, " Mr. Hawthorne hates detail! And " you had better not do too much drawing of features or you will get in trouble at the weekly criticism." But it was not possible to take those warnings very seriously because they were given by people who spread their paint in a way that would have caused consternation in the art school back home. Horrible things they were doing, great ugly blotches of pigment.

     And of course it is very difficult to take advise from painters whose work you do not like, so warnings were largely discounted. Most of us worked very patiently with the putty knife handicap and really achieved remarkable ingenuity in indicating noses, ears, mouths and eyes with the trowel-like tool.

     Nor were the putty knife and the building board the only handicaps. It is none too easy to paint outdoors under the very best circumstances but when the painting is done on a beach in the full summer sun, the sand reflecting every fierce heat ray into your eyes, when the famous Cape Cod mosquitoes are biting at every exposed inch of anatomy and when hordes of little Portuguese children are playing tag in and out of the clustered easels and when the occasional gust blows picture, easel and all flat on the sand, the whole thing becomes a nightmare.

     Aching legs, sunburned hands and faces and a devastating discouragement were the lot of many who came to Provincetown with sure hopes of a post graduate training in the subtleties of high art.

     Those who escaped discouragement during that first week were still to be tested in the fires of the Saturday criticism.

     The current philosophy of most art teachers seems to be one of cheeriness and encouragement. A pat on the back and a kind word can usually be expected by even the dumbest and most awkward tyro. Accustomed as we were to this Pollyanna style of art criticism, it is hard to imagine the outraged feelings and the disillusionment that followed the first Saturday criticism.

     Tall, picturesque, clad in immaculate white, Hawthorne the master artist literally tore us to pieces with a finality and a completeness that would have been brutal had it not been so impersonal. I think it was then and only then it dawned on us that here was a school not operated for profit; that those in charge literally did not care whether students came or went; that the teaching was not conducted with one eye on a sales chart and the other on a profit and loss statement. And it was a most disconcerting discovery.

     Never before had most of us heard about our artistic endeavors. And to many the most puzzling thing of all was the constant repetition of a certain phrase. The phrase was varied in its applications. It assumed different forms but its intent was always the same.

     "The beauty of a picture results from the way spots of color are brought together"

     This cryptic remark was never explained and the first dozen times it did not sink in very deep. "Many of us had different conceptions of a spot of color. And as to there coming together," that was another riddle.

     But as Hawthorne stood over us in the great studio at the top of the hill, pointing to row after row of putty knife pictures on a stand at the end of the room, he always managed to introduce into his criticism of each, the phrase, "beautifully ugly spots of color".

     "Can that be all this man knows about painting?", we said to ourselves. "Can the whole sum and substance of this famous training consist of talk about spots of color and how they come together? What about rules for composition, rhythm, pattern? What about technique? These are the things we came to Provincetown to learn, not to hear incomprehensible remarks about spots of color."

     Another week in the broiling sun, another week of skins burned to a crisp, another week with the putty knife and the building boards, and another criticism - not so brutal this time, not so sarcastic, words of appreciation here and there, words of appreciation particularly for those who had done plenty of work during the week. Three or four who had brought in a dozen exhibits were well praised.

     It all seemed pretty horrible to most of us. We still had the same viewpoint as the daily sightseers from the Boston boat who had come down to the beach to watch the artists and whose very souls were revolted by the horrible featureless, formless painted things on our easels.

     But our monstrosities did not seem to appall the teacher. Patiently he would study every picture that was put up. Patiently he would repeat that beauty in painting comes from putting spots of color together in a beautiful way. Occasionally he would explode at somebody who was still trying to model noses and eyes and from these occasional out bursts we would get a further idea about what he meant by spots of color and the way they came together. It finally began to penetrate into our slow wits that the reason we are not allowed to put any features in our portraits was because we actually could not see them. The blinding sun and the deep shadows made such a wide range of values that the shaded features were absolutely invisible. When we put them in we were following our imagination, not actual facts.

     It gradually dawned upon us that when Hawthorne criticized a portrait, he was not thinking of it as a face but as a spot of color in relationship to the other spots of color; the hair, the dress and the sand. We found that it irritated him for us to imagine features that no human eye could see in that blinding sunlight. We realized that he did not want a photographic portrait of the model.

     We finally came to realize that the original guess was not so far wrong-that spots of color coming together represented the beginning and the end of this man's instruction. To him that was literally the whole problem of painting. He wished to destroy our pet art school ideas of drawing, of technique, of the different tricks which would give us snappy drawings for advertisers. He was trying to make us see how trivial and foolish and unimportant they all were in the face of the fundamental, obvious thing-the thought of spots of color so conceived and so balanced that when they came together on a painted surface the final result would be beauty.

     We came to Provincetown conceited, hoping to get a finishing course, and were literally dragged back to consider matters so elementary and so fundamental we had all forgotten the little we ever knew of them.

     It was a humbling experience to be compared with that of a high school senior suddenly forced back into the first grade of a primary school.

     This deliberate insistence on fundamentals was the thing that marked Charles Hawthorne as a great teacher. A lesser man would have been tempted to show off. A lesser man would have succumbed to the questions about trifling things. A lesser man would have wandered into verbal bypaths. But he was strong because of his simplicity. He was strong because he had the courage to repeat over and over again his fundamental concept of art, knowing full well that should his hearers once understand his meaning, they would never be able to forget it.

Stephen Gilman