Cozens

A theorist, painter and teacher, famous for advocating working from the imagination, rather than from observation, Cozens suggested inventing images through free association.

Great British Watercolors 2008

I thought to myself that he might appreciate my bringing him up to date and that our squadron commander was now Captain Cozens.

Moosburg Online: Stalag VII A (Oral history: Chaffin) 1996

That Cozens anticipated a general trend toward free, spontaneous brushwork transcribing the artist's crea - tive impulse more directly than before, is amusingly attested by a French cartoon of 1844 which shows the Romantic painters, with Delacroix in the foreground, as simian virtuosos who do not even bother to look at their canvases while they paint.

CHANCE IMAGES H. W. JANSON 1968

Cozens cites Leonardo's words about the images to be seen on dirty walls, etc., but adds proudly that he thinks his procedure an improvement, since it permits the artist to produce his chance images at will, without having to seek them out in the world of nature.

CHANCE IMAGES H. W. JANSON 1968

Unlike Cozens, who still wanted his blots to yield recognizable images, Whistler solicits chance effects

CHANCE IMAGES H. W. JANSON 1968

The ink blots of Cozens 'Method, how - ever, are not meant to be entirely accidental; he defines them as “a production of chance, with a small degree of design,” since the artist is expected to think of a landscape subject in general terms while producing them.

CHANCE IMAGES H. W. JANSON 1968

Whistler's attitude toward chance effects, far more radical than Cozens ', became a matter of public record during his famous libel suit against John Ruskin, who had charged him with “flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.”

CHANCE IMAGES H. W. JANSON 1968

Chinese painters using procedures astonishingly similar to Cozens 'Method.

CHANCE IMAGES H. W. JANSON 1968

To his contemporaries, on the other hand, Cozens 'blots seemed sheer chaos, and an occasion for endless ridicule.

CHANCE IMAGES H. W. JANSON 1968

Cozens recommends that these blots be made quickly and in quantity, and that the paper be first crumpled up in the hand and then stretched out again.

CHANCE IMAGES H. W. JANSON 1968