Geneva Armstrong

“ The motif a woman.
In spite of constant strife of parties and principles, political and religious, during the Renaissance, each of those wonderful centuries sent brighter beams up and athwart the dark and troubled world, and ever-increasing light was prophetic of a broadening day.
The outcry of man's religious nature for truth wherewith to feed his soul; the hunger of his mind for knowledge; the craving of his spirit for the beautiful, the ideal, and to express his art instinct; all these powers within man were responsible for the new day, as they are today for the centuries to come. ”

“ Every sound mind is susceptible to these influences, be it beauty of color, loveliness of face or flower, tenderness of action, strength of thought or purpose, nature's message or the message of God's truth expressed in the soul's output for the world.
Pictures that stand out as Kohinoors in the art treasures of the centuries have this hall-mark which we call feeling, for no language can express it. Being spirit it alone touches our spirit, nor hath need of words, "even as love is known of love, nor needs the sense of hearing." ”

“ Thy light alone—like mist o'er mountains driven,
Or music by the night wind sent
Through strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream,—
Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream."
The more delicate the whispers of life to life, the more of truth and harmony; the more thrilling the beauty, the more deeply is the soul touched, and the higher is it lifted to meet inspiration. Delicate and deep of soul is the mind that could produce so calm and steadfast a Truth as the clear-eyed woman who looks out from her fountain home, holding her mirror to her utmost height. ”

“ In placid beauty and perfection of form, grace, and proportion, the Venus de Milo is the seeming ultimate; chaste and noble, it represents the age of perfection amid the multiforms of Greek art.
Were it a living being we would say that soul was latent. The perfection of form seemingly animated by spirit, with the added forces of nature and mind in combat, have given the world a translation in marble of the fact and act of Victory. Victory means overcoming; overcoming implies force, will, and determination; the spirit that does not weaken, that says No to wrong. ”

“ Alice Smith loves art for art's sake, but more for the sake of its influence in historic Charleston. She is first of all a landscape painter in the zenith of her power; but some years before, she was just a normal girl, so in love with nature that she would go rowing or fishing at sunrise or before, or into the cypress swamps to study "the herons at home," or amid the magnolia trees glorious at sunrise opening their white cups of fragrance, where cardinals and orioles, unaffrighted, gave her studies in color and pose. ”

“ Now and then through the ages, circumstances have singled out a woman as ruler or leader of a nation or movement, but rarely has she been identified with art except as a promoter or model for the assistance of man: a living thing of beauty that challenges his effort and skill.
Thus did their women make the art of Greece famous. So did the exquisite beauty of Simonetta lend time-honored fame to the Madonnas from the soul and brush of Botticelli. From Egypt to Greece, Greece to Rome, Rome to the Renaissance, we find few names of women in the annals of art. ”

“ Their art has kept alive many a legend and spiritual truth, that even a reading world of recent times has well-nigh lost sight of. Raphael was an idealist or he could never have painted the prodigious number of Madonnas and Saints that have given honor and fame to his name. The story of Saint Margaret lived as a legend through many centuries, coming from pagan Greece to the heart of the Renaissance and its most illustrious painter.
Raphael's ideal of Saint Margaret stands for the soulful art of that great artist; it stands for innocence, purity, and the faith and peace that fears no evil ”

“ In the figure of a woman the artist has embodied "Grief." The severely simple figure, exhausted with grief, sits leaning against the granite tomb, the hand supporting the head that would otherwise droop with its weight of woe. She is alone with her grief amid the evergreens that form a shelter for those who are sleeping their last sleep. The spirit, the idea, the environment, are in absolute harmony.
We realize that the setting forth of the subjective impersonated by the beauty and grace of woman has developed a more wonderfully symbolic art than any before known. ”

“ The expression of soul in its sincerity and devotion as the man and woman pause work, in response to the distant bell calling to evening prayer, was an oasis in the field of art and in the eagerness of the nineteenth century; it rang true to the religious instinct in men who have eyes to see and ears to hear.
Bastien Lepage depicts a pitiful condition of woman in civilized France. Something more than the weary spirit and body is on the canvas titled "Rest." A pitiful vacancy is in the stolid face of the woman who looks into space or at nothing. Her mind is limited to her little spot of life. ”

“ A more than life-size portrait of the man, seated, is in high relief, and he holds the quill pen over the manuscript; the background is in low relief, and indicates beautifully the female figure of Inspiration, with wings outspread, holding a Roman lamp as she inclines gracefully toward the earnest thinker, whose upturned face expresses inspiration. Although Miss Longman's work is with the hard material of marble, she not only achieves grace of form and line, not only texture of metal, feather, or fur, but in a marvelous degree the impress and expression of spirit, of emotion. ”

“ You are looking at a painting, yet feel a vital something that quickens your own vitality. Spirit touches spirit. The mother inspired the painter, the painter the canvas, the canvas—after five hundred years—gives of its recorded spirit to your spirit. Is art developing? Is the ideal gliding down the arm and spirit lifting the heart of him who holds the brush? Is true beauty manifesting in the life of humanity? ”

“ It has been a long road from crude marks and symbols to the art of today as expressed in exquisite drawings, modelings, color and proportions of some twentieth century work. Looking at the work of our time, we realize that man has not labored merely for pelf, nor wholly for the pleasure and development of his faculties, nor yet to add a spoke to the wheel of progress, nor to produce something for critics to whet their wit upon, or upon which they may focus wisdom for the benefit of those who have lacked opportunity. ”

“ What could be a more natural sequence of such art work than that which Miss Smith has developed from it—the painting of portraits of children; and they are charming portraits. She has pleasured the child-spirit so devotedly that the child-nature is at home in her own heart, and the result of her brush work is most vital and enticing. The little ones seem to wake up from her canvas and look at you as an interesting study, innocent of the fact that you find them most interesting ”

“ Barring accident, neglect or epidemic, the human is bound to live to a good old age. All things being normal, hard work does not kill a man be he a farmer, mason, or artist. Some few of the Renaissance masters reached great age, also a few American painters. Being an artist does not prolong life, but the love and desire for beauty, the ability to appreciate it on canvas, the longing to depict and the thrill of the developing ideal under your hand, the spirit ever reaching higher and for truer beauty, these are the powers that enrich and prolong life. ”

“ The tender blending of light and shade, curves and color-tones of flesh, pulsing warmth and glow radiating from the spirit within, chaste in idea, in subject—such a nude has a charm and conveys a sacredness of the body as the work of the Creator.
The very illusiveness of spirit gives the greatest difficulty in painting the nude, and has caused that branch of delineation to be the high-water mark of excellence among painters. When they cannot reach it, the public has the opportunity to see poor or bad art. ”

“ As love responds to love, so does beauty touch the note of beauty in the human heart, with more or less of vigor according to its expression or presentation.
The art of a nation marks its growth; we realize this when we note that individuals, groups, art leagues, schools, and museums of art, with great rapidity and vigor, are springing up in all sections of the country—those in the south and west of prime interest because they are younger, fresh and strong with enthusiasm, new ideas, and the freshness of spirit with which they appreciate and appropriate what their section of country offers. ”

“ From the very shape and form of that memorial tablet, carved as an intaglio, comes the low relief of Inspiration bringing forth the high relief of thought in the brow and eye to action with hand and pen.
The setting, the environment of even the finest works of plastic art may heighten or mar their beauty, if not in harmony; but the architect, Henry Bacon, has enhanced the idea of the artist by his appreciation of the spirit and dignity of her subjects. ”

“ In those days men of talent and taste were wont to give to women of their admiration and love a literary setting, as did Petrarch to his Laura, Abelard to Heloise, and others, thus assuring us of exalted womanhood, if not perfect.
It was not mere beauty of color and curve that captured the eye and mind of the great Florentine master of chisel and brush; one cannot read his sonnets without knowing that the goddess of his heart exercised an influence far nobler than the art it helped to ennoble. ”

“ There is a painting true to the life and suggestive of the generation that is passing. Again we have one of those Rembrandt backgrounds, for it is a deep twilight effect. You can just discover the window through the delicate curtains, and the blooming plant on the sill. The mother is at the piano, and the gleam from the one candle lights the faces of mother and daughter. With one hand she accompanies the old song, the other is about the listening child. It is the sweet refrain of an old, old song to the mother; it is just a lovely experience to the little girl. ”

“ The responsibility and love that has come to her with her sweet and marvelous babe gleams from her face and from her clasp of the little one to her breast. He is hers yet not hers. He is born with a mission, and the mother is God's helper in preparing Him for that mission. The throng of thoughts that mean motherhood can be read in that saintly face, and so powerful is thought to the human soul that the soul of the Child seems one with hers.
Such is the beauty and mystery of spirit. ”

“ Though very quiet in her taste, not caring for ostentation in any form, the bestowal of the medal was an honor prized by the artist; but soon she received from the state a beautiful Sevres vase and an order for a painting. To fill that order Rosa Bonheur gave the world the picture now so familiarly known, "Plowing in the Nevernais." Those are splendid oxen, doing the work they were made for, breaking the hard fallow ground for a crop. Their legs well set on the body, and the feet in the furrow, show the muscular strain and action perfect to the life. ”

“ There were no rules governing that playroom, except that Miss Eberle liked you to say "Good morning," and put you out for the day if you were too noisy. The door was always open between studio and playroom. But the motive was not to keep tabs—at least not in the school-marm way. One would think the children would have invaded Miss Eberle's privacy rather than she theirs, for she stood there all day at a tall stand playing her own games with heavy, messy, soft clay. But she had drawn a chalk mark—like Merlin's magic circle—around the modeling stand, and none dare invade it except—invited." ”

“ Whence the mentality that produced their poets, dramatists, and thinkers who brillianced the centuries of Greek dominance in culture? The various shades of life in tribes and nations are needed in the weaving of the endless tapestry of humanity; shades of skin may count with some, but in the study of art it is the shade of mentality, of innate moral fibre and refinement, that counts.
Not all the inhabitants of Greece, nor even of Athens, were artists, nor men of letters. There were as wide differences in humans then as now and here. ”

“ Landscape painting in oil and water color was her principal interest, but whatever she saw had a message for her, and her expression of it on canvas made one feel the open, far-flung plain, or the height and scope of mountains, distant towns, boats, and people, for she painted what appealed to her. She did not abandon one branch of art for another—she simply carried on from one application of art to another. ”

“ A tiny girl about two and a half years, singing a wordless happiness to herself, climbed upon the couch under the painting to play amid the soft pillows. Soon her eye caught the face of the Boy, radiating a sort of spirit-light as he talked. After a little, touching him with a dainty finger, far as tip-toes enabled her to reach, she lisped to herself, "Pitty boy, I loves oo, I loves oo," and baby fashion danced up and down as she studied the face. Then her eye lighted on the sober man. The song ceased, the happiness went out of her flower-like face as she slowly pointed her finger at him. ”

“ No painter should put brush to wall until he knows the wall.
In this bird's eye view down the centuries, we see more and more of proportion, harmony, color and form in the arts and architecture, in the crafts and cunning of man's handiwork. With the commercial, intellectual and religious development of a nation, the arts become more expressive of conditions, achievements and ideals.
Mural work demands a high and strong mentality in man or woman, and a rugged physique, for it entails hard work for body and brain. ”