Thomas Craven

“ Whether it is possible for colour, when intensified to the glaring transparency of light, to stimulate us aesthetically by a mere indication of sequential action, I cannot say. The science of optics would be against the assumption; for the eye, unlike the ear, cannot accommodate itself to intense and prolonged sensations. This, however, belongs to the future, and Mr Wright only prophesies—he makes no definite explanations. He argues that the human organism in the exciting stress of modern life can no longer react to so tepid an art as painting. ”

“ At certain happy moments, those of us who have advocated the human value of aesthetics are inclined to feel enthusiastic over the advance of modernism—and then Mr Butler comes along and puts us out of humour, and forces us to return to the elementary stages of our efforts. It would seem that the hypothetical person of average intelligence seeking information must be led back to first principles—so let us cry out once more in unison, "Art is not imitation, but reconstruction!" ”

“ The completely equipped modern painter must, of course, be familiar with external nature, and to a certain extent with the laws governing it; but to attach much importance to the latter in a book devoted to structural problems is a waste of time. The study of scientific laws belongs to a relatively narrow and insignificant field of painting, a technical field which includes the chemistry of pigments, the permanence of grounds, the qualities of media, and the mechanics of intermixtures in tone and colour. ”

“ Mr Butler's conception of realism has no basis in experience; it is an old and academic set of laboratory deductions, bearing practically no connexion with our emotional contacts, and therefore of little use either to artist or layman. It is a truism that art is born only in our emotional contacts, and that it is forwarded and pushed to completion, however intellectual the processes called into play, by distinctly emotional impulses. ”

“ Whether sequences of colour and form operate sensationally in time, or in the calmer intellectual world of pure contemplation, is of no moment—a change of vehicle implies no more than a surface alteration. I do not believe, however, that Mr Wright's opinions will have much weight in the new art which he sponsors. If such an art is feasible, it will introduce new designs compatible with its content, as in the case of the new movements in painting. ”

“ The world that confronts us on looking out of a window is not simply an optical phenomenon; concentrate upon it for a moment and the entire range of visual sensations is dissolved in memories and a general psychic awakening absolutely inexpressible by scientific optics as resumed in the laws of perspective and the gradations of colour-tones under atmospheric conditions. ”

“ In plain language, no intelligent painter wishes to cluster all his important forms in the foreground of his picture—an inevitable condition, if he adheres to scientific descriptions, or isolates the purely visual parts of his experience. ”

“ Our emotions of colour and volume are equally applicable to things near and far; and since these emotions arise for the most part from mental constructs, they must have mental rather than visual modes of interpretation. In consequence, Cézanne's treatment of landscape is eminently justified. Pictorially, the interaction of line and mass does not always conform with correct geometrical perspective; and the most successful painter of depth is he who combines his lines and masses so that the inherent dynamism is one with the special problem of recession and relief. ”

“ The "aesthetic emotion"—in truth, only a popular hack, no psychologist having succeeded in separating it from other emotions—serves as the basis of a treatise which presents the history of art as nothing more or less than mechanical expansion. ”

“ All questions of drawing, colour, line, mass, et cetera, apart from the meaning they convey when combined into expressive symbols, are essentially mechanical; indeed they are as remote from true aesthetics as would be a knowledge of geology and botany in the analysis of the emotional appeal of a beautiful landscape. Technical manipulation, even among artists, has been at all times of far less concern than Mr Wright concedes. ”

“ While the artist is of necessity interested in procedure, that interest is always subordinate, in genuine creative activity, to conception. We find to-day among radical painters a growing preoccupation with ideas; and even from the first appearance of Modernism the main quarrel with the academy has been one of content, of meaning, and not one of processes. The academy in turn objects to the new movements on the ground that they exploit a brutalized and false conception of life. ”

“ The drama of the Greeks and the plastic art of the Renaissance are obviously creative symbols and not mere records or imitations of experience—the old writers on aesthetics were less explicit in their use of terms than the psychological critics of the present time. ”

“ Any person of ordinary intelligence, with a fair sense of human values and a flair for art, who is looking for a little knowledge of the methods of painting, would be profanely repelled by the assemblage of irrelevant mechanics herein presented. ”

“ It is a much better book than the ridiculous title would indicate; in fact, a work of uncommon beauty, decidedly different from Soliloquies of a Hermit, and possessed of many of the qualities of fine fiction. Mr Powys is no longer the preacher—a more intimate acquaintance with the Dorset villagers has robbed him of his faith; and though he has failed to save his soul, he has taken the raw materials of rural life and shaped them into literary forms, and that, in itself, is one kind of salvation. ”

“ Mr Butler does not completely overlook the value of the personal equation, but he commits the common academic blunder of separating it from the processes embodied in plastic composition. He does not seem to grasp the fact that our various ways of seeing things, of going up against the world, demand in our different expressions very special interpretations, and that a distorted perspective and a violently forced tonality may be not only adequate, but necessary to enhance certain emotions of depth. ”

“ Both Leonardo da Vinci and Aristotle were accustomed to speak of art as the imitation of nature. It would be a simple matter to annihilate that pernicious word by recasting their definitions in modern terminology ”

“ As long as there are conceptions sufficiently moving to provoke expressional volition, new forms will be found to embody them. If it were true, as Mr Wright holds, that all compositional rhythms have been utilized, there would be no need for the new art of mobile colour; for this innovation at best could only restate in a new medium things which have already been fixed in the theoretic mind. ”

“ Mr Powys is singularly successful in his handling of sexual matters; the stolid repressions of the Dorset folk are cleverly hinted at, and then suddenly divulged with swift and unexpected fierceness. It is a relief to find a writer who appreciates the significance of sex, and is not afraid to discuss the subject honestly ”

“ Similarly, the proportions arrived at by simple vision cannot function in any design penetrating deeper than the surface of the canvas, for the reason that the orientation of volumes, in a truly spatial art, is fully as necessary as the placement of tones. ”

“ The fault is largely the result of an incongruous mixture of genuine realism and whimsicality—the author is unable to control his imagination, and when pressed for a solution drops into unseemly mannerisms—short sentences, illegitimate surprises, and childish personifications. ”

“ Mr Butler explains the term values with unusual clarity, but vastly exaggerates the participation of natural values in the construction of the third dimension. The logic of composition—the fundamental need for congruity—demands a balance of light and dark throughout the canvas, a distribution of tonal areas approximately equal in intensity, but entirely at variance with literal values: nature, faithfully transcribed, reveals an unduly prominent foreground and a blurred stretch of distance ”

“ Aesthetics is a study of the relationship between the theoretic spirit and form, both of the building of form and the responses to it; the means by which form is delineated are of small consideration compared with the psychological states involved in construction and appreciation. ”

“ He is a sort of sculptor in great extensions, carving in light and shadow and colour instead of marble. Cézanne was such a painter—but the author believes that "Cézanne did nothing to aid in the rendering of the third dimension."
Mr Butler's idea that pictures should be manufactured according to the optical sensations of binocular vision is moderately interesting as a tour de force, but it has no place in creative work. It reduces art to the superficial mechanics of imitation ”

“ It does not occur to him that the peculiarities of optical illusion are part and parcel of our daily experience, and that we build up our world by inference over and beyond them. The artist has no interest in the dead level of scientific law ”

“ What is needed just now is not a discussion of general descriptive laws—works of this character when applied to artistic activity always turn out to be pseudo-scientific and false—but a psychological inquiry into the relations between our direct perceptions of nature and the consequent aesthetic expression. ”