Artistic ability

“ Thus, while the three arts are each limited to their own special functions, they, at the same time, would appear to assimilate from each other what is lacking in themselves, and so contribute to the complete artistic harmony. ”

“ Considered simply as a natural basis a talent of this kind asserts itself for the most part in early youth, and is manifested in the restless persistency, ever intent with vivacity and alertness, to create artistic shapes in some particular sensuous medium, and to make this mode of expression and utterance the unique one or the one of main importance and most suitable. ”

“ All art, therefore, appeals primarily to the senses, and the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its appeal through the senses, if its [Pg 19] high desire is to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions. It must strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour of painting, and to the magic suggestiveness of music—which is the art of arts. ”

“ And as, when our eye beholds the products of an artist’s labour, the mind, immediately on perceiving anything of unusual artistic excellence, burns to know of what nature it is, or how it was formed, or to what purposes it was fashioned ”

“ In one word, in all their pictorial accomplishment they succeed in combining with freedom, and truth of conception, with their enthusiasm for what is in appearance of inferior and momentary significance, with the freshness of open vision and the concentration of their entire soul on all that is most stamped with the seclusion and limitations of their life, the most ample freedom of artistic composition, no less than the finest feeling for accessories and the most perfect effects of studious elaboration. ”

“ All attempts to define absolute beauty in itself—whether as an imitation of nature, or as suitability to its object, or as a correspondence of parts, or as symmetry, or as harmony, or as unity in variety, etc.—either define nothing at all, or define only some traits of some artistic productions, and are far from including all that everybody has always held, and still holds, to be art. ”

“ If the definition of realistic art be “a piece of nature seen through a temperament,” that of the new movement may be “an artistic temperament attuned to pieces of nature,” a sensitive and supple talent which has an almost unlimited capacity to tell every story just in the vein its particular subject demands. ”

“ These groups were as refined in composition as they were exuberant,{207} exhibiting the genuine creativeness of an artist who has an instinct for decoration and a lively delight in the pure expression of line and form, regulated by an instinct also of artistic propriety. ”

“ That very concentration of vision and intensity of purpose which is the characteristic of the artistic temperament is in itself a mode of limitation. To those who are preoccupied with the beauty of form nothing else seems of much importance. ”

“ It is pre-eminently in this field that for compensation of such defects a fine artistic power in the accurate and exhaustive delineation of character is manifested, or a true mastery of the craft discovers its best opportunity for an admirably thought-out intrigue. ”

“ Their difficulties of execution arise from the necessities of artistic expression, and such difficulties will be found in all the truest and best art, the art that lives beyond the fashion of the hour. ”

“ If the work is artistic, the spectator's interest will center in feeling the life in the color and line or sculptured form; that it happens to be an imitation of something else will become of secondary importance. ”

“ And the corollary of this, as said before, is that, since artistic potentialities exist in all men according to their being and environment, the realm of art will present as large a variety of values, types, and manifestations as does our life itself. ”

“ Whether the medium be the painter's color, the musician's tones, or the poet's words, the purpose of the representation is fulfilled in so far as the work expresses the emotion which the artist has felt in the presence of this spectacle. He, the artist, more than I or another, has thrilled to its mystery, its tumult, its power. It is this effect, received as a unity of impression, that he wants to communicate. This power of the object over him, and consequently the content of his work, is beauty. ”

“ Here is your great artist, your great exceptional mind groping in the darknesses beneath the surface of life, half apprehending strange elusive things in those profundities, and striving—striving sometimes to the utmost verge of human endeavour—to give that strange unsuspected mystery expression, to shape it, to shadow it in form and wonder of colour, in beautiful rhythms, in phantasies of narrative, in gracious and glowing words. So much in its essential and precious degree is art. Think of what the world must be in the wider vision of the great artist. ”

“ Third, the perfect use of the medium in the effort to fulfill the artistic purpose of sympathetic representation—the power to delight the senses and create sympathy for the object expressed, on the one hand, and the range of the vision of the object, on the other; the depth and the breadth of the aesthetic experience. With reference to the former we ask: how vividly does the work of art force us to see; how completely does it make us enter into the world it has created ”

“ Be the artist man or woman, and be their art expressed in sculpture or painting, the dominant element in personality will be the dominant trend in their art. That fact accounts for the variety in taste, ability and appreciation. We realize that fact the more we study "one man shows." ”

“ Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. ”

“ If the artist be imaginative, he may depict, hovering over their several emblems, dim, shadowy forms to represent, respectively, the genius of music, of painting, of literature, each vainly, and sorrowfully because vainly, beckoning the ruffler away. ”

“ If you should ask a dozen painters what mental qualification was most essential to an artist's success, the chances are that every man of them would reply "temperament"—in other words, genius and imagination. ”

“ This desire for expression is the driving-force of the artist; it informs, controls, and animates his method of working; it governs the hand and eye. That figures should give the impression of life and spontaneity, that the sun should shine, trees move in the wind, and nature be felt and represented as a living thing—this is the firm ground in art; and in those who have this feeling every effort will, consciously or unconsciously, lead towards its realisation. ”

“ Even thus the spirit, immersed in things of sense presented to us by the figurative arts, is still spirit, though diminished in its intellectual clearness and invested with hues not its own. To fashion that alabaster form of art with utmost skill, to make it beautiful, to render it transparent, is the artist's function. ”

“ The world will see a simple rag
Become a treasure rarely known.
LINES TO A PROMISING YOUNG ARTIST. These bays be thine; and, tho’ not form’d to shine
Clear as thy colour, faultless as thy line,
Yet shall the Muse essay, in humble verse,
Thy merits, lovely Painting! to rehearse. ”

“ But I think it will bring you something besides this, something that is the knowledge of real strength in art: not that you should imitate the works of these men; but their artistic spirit, their artistic attitude, I think you should absorb that. ”

“ Each art has its own medium of expression and to this medium it absolutely adheres in its periods of greatness, adapting itself to its limitations, working within them, and even making them tributary to its excellence. ”

“ Therefore, if one should be under the mistake of thinking that these qualifications are attainable by art, what will such a one say of those which are certainly born with them; such as the volubility of tongue, the music of the voice, the strength of lungs, the symmetry and beauty of the look and figure? ”

“ Comparing these several manifestations of creative power, we feel ourselves in the grasp of a painter who was essentially a poet, one for whom his art was the medium for expressing before all things thought and passion. ”

“ for I wish rather, in this lecture at least, to dwell on the effect that decorative art has on human life—on its social not its purely artistic effect. ”

“ It may be, to use the figure of the artist, that the purpose is not solely the production of man, but that the variety and beauty of the natural world is an expression of the joy of the Creative Artist in his work. ”

“ Not that the execution of the work demands great ability in reproducing it—the artist’s skill is developed and shown in the proper arrangement and use of coloring, and also in the proper tracing out of the work itself, but that without the other will surely disappoint. ”

“ In the actual to discern the ideal, in the appearance to penetrate to the reality, without taking leave of the material to reveal the spiritual,—this is the mystery and vocation of the artist, and his achievement is art. ”

“ The truly educated man in art perceives the adaptation, polish, and perfection in literature; discovers the grace, the just proportions, the ideal form and typical idea in sculpture; views the expression, grouping, sentiment, coloring, and human passion in painting; enjoys the harmonies, movements, and ideas in music, that combination of effects that makes subtile and evasive metaphors ”

“ The idea is that of an artist, pure, simple, and direct in his work, who should excel equally in all the arts, and show—even though his work be an exception to all rules—the consummate success of such a course. ”

“ This concealment of all artifice, this artlessness and spontaneity of appearance, is one of the greatest qualities in a composition, any analysis of which is futile. It is what occasionally gives to the work of the unlettered genius so great a charm. But the artist in whom the true spark has not been quenched by worldly success or other enervating influence, keeps the secret of this freshness right on, the culture of his student days being used only to give it splendour of expression, but never to stifle or suppress its native charm. ”

“ Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole—so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader’s consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page. ”

“ To wring from nature its countless harmonies of tone and colour, to seize and interpret the endless subtleties of individual form and character—these are the ideals that have inspired and have satisfied many of the greatest painters the world has produced. Who then shall say that Art has need of any other, any wider ambition? ”

“ Well, I know what art is in the same way.”
“Yes, but I ask you as a favour to define it for me. A picture is art, a living person is life. We sitting here are life; if we were talking on a stage we should be art. How would you define art?” ”

“ Painting being a representation of nature, every spectator, according to the justness of his ideas, may form an opinion how far the representation is happily pourtrayed, and in beholding it, experience a proportionate degree of pleasure: but how different the sensations of him who, combining all the requisites of a connoisseur, contemplates the composition of a masterly genius! ”

“ As the expression on a face speaks to a delicate sense, often communicating more, other, and better than can be seen, so the proportion, harmony, rhythm of a painting may beget moods and joys that require the full resources of a well-stored mind and disciplined character in order that they may be fully relished--in brief, demand that maturity of reason which is the mark of victorious man. ”

“ Is there any other branch of intellectual art which has such a direct appeal, by the very nature of it, to every sane human being as the art of painting? There it is, able to represent through a medium which offers itself to you palpably, in the shape of so many visible feet of canvass, actual human facts, and distinct aspects of Nature, which poetry can only describe, and which music can but obscurely hint at. ”

“ The ultimate significance of a work of art is its content of emotion, the essential controlling idea, which inspires the work and gives it concrete form. In its actual embodiment, the expressive power of the work resides in the medium. The medium of any art, then, as color and mass in painting, line in drawing and etching, form in sculpture, sound in music, is its means of expression and constitutes its language. ”

“ Your eyes may criticise and your hands may accomplish art-work, but the inspiration that truly expresses art comes from Mind alone. Thus the finer and more harmonious the thoughts of the mentality that thinks, the more beautiful and perfect will be his achievement in any line of work. ”

“ The complete mastery of technique, the dignity and dramatic force of the characters, the beauty of the language and clear directness of the style together with the vivid imagination needed to portray so strikingly the renaissance spirit and atmosphere, make the work one that should last. ”

“ For this, Art is required, and the true disciples of the great artist are not his studio-imitators, but those who become like his works of art, be they plastic as in Greek days, or pictorial as in modern times; in a word, Life is Art’s best, Art’s only pupil. ”

“ The artist or the art-critic, discriminating still, even among these raw materials of human creation, derives an elaborate and subtle delight from the suggestiveness of their colours, their odours, and their fabrics—conscious all the while of wondrous and visionary evocations, wherein they take their place. ”