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"Once a Catholic"
Photo Composition
by
Dominic Rouse
I have had this editorial in my keeping for some time now. I find it to be of value to artists even by today's standards -- 122 years later. Let me know what you think.....
Art And Morality
Art is the highest form of expression, and exists for the sake of expression. Through art thoughts become visible. Back of forms are the desire, the longing, the brooding creative instinct, the maternity of mind and the passion that give pose and swell, outline and color.
Of course there is no such thing as absolute beauty or absolute morality.
As man is concerned, his thoughts have been produced by his surroundings, by the action and interaction of things upon his mind; and so far as man is concerned, things have preceded thoughts. The impressions that these things make upon us are what we know of them. The absolute is beyond the human mind. Our knowledge is confined to the relations that exist between the totality of things that we call the universe, and the effect upon ourselves.
Actions are deemed right or wrong, according to experience and the conclusions of reason. Things are beautiful by the relation that certain forms, colors, and modes of expression bear to us. At the foundation of the beautiful will be found the fact of happiness, the gratification of the senses, the delight of intellectual discovery and the surprise and thrill of appreciation. That which we call the beautiful, wakens into life through the association of ideas, of memories, of experiences, of suggestions of pleasure past and the perception that the prophecies of the ideal have been and will be fulfilled.
Art cultivates and kindles the imagination, and quickens the conscience. It is by imagination that we put ourselves in the place of another. Love and pity are the children of the imagination.
Happy people were supposed to have forgotten, in a reckless moment, duty and responsibility. True poetry would call them back to a realization of their meanness and their misery. It was the skeleton at the feast, the rattle of whose bones had a rhythmic sound. That was the forefinger of warning and doom held up in the presence of a smile.
These moral poets taught the "unwelcome truths," and by the paths of life put posts on which they painted hands pointing at graves. They loved to see the pallor on the cheek of youth, while they talked, in solemn tones, of age, decrepitude and lifeless clay.
Before the eyes of love they thrust, with eager hands, the skull of death. They crushed the flowers beneath their feet and plaited crowns of thorns for every brow.
According to these poets, happiness was inconsistent with virtue. The sense of infinite obligation should be perpetually present. They assumed an attitude of superiority. They denounced and calumniated the reader. They enjoyed his confusion when charged with total depravity. They loved to paint the sufferings of the lost, the worthlessness of human life, the littleness of mankind, and the beauties of an unknown world. They knew but little of the heart. They did not know that without passion there is no virtue, and that the really passionate are the virtuous.
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Das Abendmahl 2"
by Thomas Demuth
Art and Morality -- Continued
Art has nothing to do directly with morality or immorality. It is its own excuse for being; it exists for itself.
There is an infinite difference between the nude and the naked, between the natural and the undressed. In the presence of the pure, unconscious nude, nothing can be more contemptible than those forms in which are the hints and suggestions of drapery, the pretence of exposure, and the failure to conceal. The undressed is vulgar -- the nude is pure.
The old Greek statues, frankly, proudly nude, whose free and perfect limbs have never known the sacrilege of clothes, were and are as free from taint, as pure, as stainless, as the image of the morning star trembling in a drop of perfumed dew.
Morality is the harmony between act and circumstance. It is the melody of conduct. A wonderful statue is the melody of proportion. A great picture is the melody of form and color. A great statue does not suggest labor; it seems to have been created as a joy. A great painting suggests no weariness and no effort; the greater, the easier it seems. So a great and splendid life seems to have been without effort. There is in it no idea of obligation, no idea of responsibility or of duty. The idea of duty changes to a kind of drudgery that which should be, in the perfect man, a perfect pleasure.
The artist, working simply for the sake of enforcing a moral, becomes a laborer. The freedom of genius is lost, and the artist is absorbed in the citizen. The soul of the real artist should be moved by this melody of proportion as the body is unconsciously swayed by the rhythm of a symphony. No one can imagine that the great men who chiseled the statues of antiquity intended to teach the youth of Greece to be obedient to their parents. We cannot believe that Michael Angelo painted his grotesque and somewhat vulgar "Day of judgment" for the purpose of reforming Italian thieves. The subject was in all probability selected by his employer, and the treatment was a question of art, without the slightest reference to the moral effect, even upon priests. We are perfectly certain that Corot painted those infinitely poetic landscapes, those cottages, those sad poplars, those leafless vines on weather-tinted walls, those quiet pools, those contented cattle, those fields flecked with light, over which bend the skies, tender as the breast of a mother, without once thinking of the ten commandments. There is the same difference between moral art and the product of true genius, that there is between prudery and virtue.
The novelists who endeavor to enforce what they are pleased to call "moral truths," cease to be artists. They create two kinds of characters -- types and caricatures. The first never has lived, and the second never will. The real artist produces neither. In his pages you will find individuals, natural people, who have the contradictions and inconsistencies inseparable from humanity. The great artists "hold the mirror up to nature," and this mirror reflects with absolute accuracy. The artist deals either in the impossible or the exceptional. Their words and works throb in unison with the great ebb and flow of things. They write and work for all races and for all time.
It has been the object of thousands of reformers to destroy the passions, to do away with desires; and could this object be accomplished, life would become a burden, with but one desire -- that is to say, the desire for extinction. Art in its highest forms increases passion, gives tone and color and zest to life. But while it increases passion, it refines. It extends the horizon. The bare necessities of life constitute a prison, a dungeon. Under the influence of art the walls expand, the roof rises, and it becomes a temple.
Art is not a sermon, and the artist is not a preacher. Art accomplishes by indirection. The beautiful refines. The perfect in art suggests the perfect in conduct. The harmony in music teaches, without intention, the lesson of proportion in life. The bird in his song has no moral purpose, and yet the influence is humanizing. The beautiful in nature acts through appreciation and sympathy. It does not browbeat, neither does it humiliate. It is beautiful without regard to you. Art creates an atmosphere in which the proprieties, the amenities, and the virtues unconsciously grow. The rain does not lecture the seed. The light does not make rules for the vine and flower.
Art creates, combines, and reveals. It is the highest manifestation of thought, of passion, of love, of intuition. It is the highest form of expression, of history and prophecy. It allows us to look at an unmasked soul, to fathom the abysses of passion, to understand the heights and depths of love.
Art civilizes because it enlightens, develops, strengthens, ennobles. It deals with the beautiful, with the passionate, with the ideal. It is the child of the heart. To be great, it must deal with the human. It must be in accordance with the experience, with the hopes, with the fears, and with the possibilities of man. No one cares to paint a palace, because there is nothing in such a picture to touch the heart. It tells of responsibility, of the prison, of the conventional. It suggests a load -- it tells of apprehension, of weariness and ennui. The picture of a cottage, over which runs a vine, a little home thatched with content, with its simple life, its natural sunshine and shadow, its trees bending with fruit, its hollyhocks and pinks, its happy children, its hum of bees, is a poem -- a smile in the desert of this world.
In all art you will find a touch of chaos, of liberty; and there is in all artists a little of the vagabond -- that is to say, genius.
The prudent is not the poetic; it is the mathematical. Genius is the spirit of abandon; it is joyous, irresponsible. It moves in the swell and curve of billows; it is careless of conduct and consequence. For a moment, the chain of cause and effect seems broken; the soul is free. It gives an account not even to itself. Limitations are forgotten; nature seems obedient to the will; the ideal alone exists; the universe is a symphony.
Every brain is a gallery of art, and every soul is, to a greater or less degree, an artist. The pictures and statues that now enrich and adorn the walls and niches of the world, as well as those that illuminate the pages of its literature, were taken originally from the private galleries of the brain.
The soul -- that is to say the artist -- compares the pictures in its own brain with the pictures that have been taken from the galleries of others and made visible. This soul, this artist, selects that which is nearest perfection in each, takes such parts as it deems perfect, puts them together, forms new pictures, new statues, and in this way creates the ideal.
To express desires, longings, ecstasies, prophecies and passions in form and color; to put love, hope, heroism and triumph in marble; to paint dreams and memories with words; to portray the purity of dawn, the intensity and glory of noon, the tenderness of twilight, the splendor and mystery of night, with sounds; to give the invisible to sight and touch, and to enrich the common things of earth with gems and jewels of the mind -- this is Art.
Our Discussion Continutes--Is "Random" Possible??
Comment: "Actually I believe what we call 'nature' is awash in a thick soup of random chemicals, electromagnetic waves and particles. What we perceive is a very narrow slice of all that is about us and what is about us is basically undifferentiated random occurrences. It is through the filter of our brain and the senses that are its input that we perceive anything at all. It is the judgement and meaning that is created in our brain that carves our experience out from the background of total randomness. There is no "blue" in nature, just as there are no "bad" smells. These experiences and judgments are constructed by our minds to protect and help us navigate through the surrounding randomness. What it all means... what it looks like... function and condition... are all the products of our magnificent (but limited) tools of perception and imagination.
Randomness is not the antithesis of what is, it is what is. We are what we make out of this random background, which is the whole of nature. Without us there is no meaning, since that too is something we cobble together from our own narrow range of perception. Therefore, there is plenty of room and reason to both fully embrace randomness and, at the same time, appreciate how we artfully construct each instant we are alive within it.
Randomness may seem impossible only because we are designed to emerge from it. That is what we do. We create the connections between things. We create the order and write the story of those perceived connections. In a sense, we are seeing everything after it has been filtered for us by our consciousness. In that instant, we construct the whole world of meaning, cause, effect and predictability.
I would turn the whole question around, Mary, and ask if we simply do not know enough about ourselves and the world we live in to perceive any action, function or condition as being rooted in randomness. Or, perhaps... we do not want to know or dwell on this because it frightens us, somehow. However, it shouldn't frighten us simply because, as I have said, we have been designed not to see the randomness. We are wired not to deal with it directly, but rather to spend our time dealing with the little slice we have carved out of it.
JDJ
Dear JD, I agree. "We have been designed not to see the randomness" - a matter of survival perhaps.
For the most part I think we judge “randomness" by its ability to exploit probability. You’re right, human beings are hard-wired to connect things, make order out of disorder. We tend to migrate towards what we perceive as comprehensible; What makes sense to us personally.
One of the things that we can learn from the concept of fractals is that behind apparent randomness is probability. It is simply that we lack understanding. For instance, you may not know the exact position, mass or velocity of two moving particles in your coffee cup, but you certainly don't hesitate to drink hot coffee from it. The fact that we do not know how those particles are interacting does not mean that they aren’t.
Therefore, isn't what we call randomness just a degree of "uncertainty?” Would you agree that absolute (intellectual) uncertainty equals randomness? Fears being a by-product of uncertainty?
There are aspects to creating art that are always unknown. One can never anticipate with absolute certainty the whole experience. It is not until you put paint to canvas, or program to task, that the real nature of the art is known. It is an interactive process with seemingly infinite variables. Artists explore this relationship not with uncertainty, but with conviction and purpose. There is an awareness of intent.
Mary
"January
, Warming at the Fire (The Creation) "
"Genesis Calendar" by
Christopher Bennett
Cool Links:
An interesting blog at MOMA INSIDE AND OUT
Something different:
Beinart International Surreal Art Collective
"The ever-expanding online gallery of surrealist, psychedelic, esoteric, outsider, fantastic, toy, lowbrow, comic, erotic & visionary artists."
IN-BOX:
Submitted by "lamb" (lamb_bi_nature@yahoo.com) on Friday, February 26, 2010
Comment: Hello Mary and Don,
I have had trouble figuring out the proper sizes in bytes and mega bytes, etc. I finally found this little site that lets you figure it out easily with no trouble... Byte Converter
I thought you might like to post this converter for other digital artists' benefit. I simply went to the site and added it as a favorite (or bookmark) and can easily call it up when ever I need. You do not have to download this program. Hope this helps other Byte challanged artists like me!
Outsiders on Sturt Street featured during the Adelaide Festival /Australia...
"...'Outsider Art', consists of works produced by people who for various reasons have not been culturally indocrinated or socially conditioned.... Working outside [of the] fine art system (schools, galleries, museums and so on), these people have produced, from the depths of their own personalities works of outstanding originality in concept, subject and techniques. They are works which owe nothing to tradition or fashion." Michel Thevoz, Curator of the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne
Featuring works by:
Betty Anderson - Adelaide
Read More at:Adelaide Festival 2010 and Adelaide Fringe
Congratulations Claudio!!
This page posted 1 March 2010
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