Artistry

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At these I look with such unalloyed delight, that I have been at moments tempted to wish that the artist had concentrated his powers on this department of art, in so high a degree does he exhibit the attributes of the master; a power of sympathy, which gives each landscape a perfectly individual character. Here the painter is merged in his theme, and these pictures affect us as parts of nature, so absorbed are we in contemplating them, so difficult is it to remember them as pictures. ”

“ This manner is in reality, in painting, what language is in poetry; we are all sensible how differently the imagination is affected by the same sentiment expressed in different words, and how mean or how grand the same object appears when presented to us by different painters. Whether it is the human figure, an animal, or even inanimate objects, there is nothing, however unpromising in appearance, but may be raised into dignity, convey sentiment, and produce emotion, in the hands of a painter of genius. ”

“ 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. ”

“ By the originality and vigour of the spiritual life and of the emotion of which the work is an expression, together with its power of impressing these characteristics on the reader. All art is the expression of some emotion, and has for its object the production of emotions. The deeper a signet gem is cut, the sharper, the clearer are the outlines in wax. The deeper the impression in the soul of the artist, the clearer, the more forcible is its artistic expression. ”

“ Then I would say, ‘I would like to be an artist now, that I might paint, not the care-worn countenance and the uneasy air of one seemingly out of harmony with the scene about her, but the soul that sometimes looks out from under those large lids. ”

“ In our love of the fine arts, our attention is occupied with human imitations of what is beautiful in nature;—in this, we fix our admiration at once on the magnificent works of the Great Artist of the Universe. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Before we can come to a true initiation into, and an abiding enjoyment of, the domains of representative art, we must have a keen, clear, settled, and contented view of its limitations. Far less of the fruitlessness of discontent enters into poetry and literature than into the subject of painting and sculpture. ”

“ Whether you be painter, sculptor, musician or writer, all your endeavors are toward lifting from the mass of things a scene, a form, a harmony, a truth, and, relieving it from all that distracts, catch it in immortal amber. ”

“ All which infers, moreover, that a full appreciation of any true work of art cannot be extemporized; for such a work has a thousand meanings, which open out upon the eye gradually, as the eye feeds and grows and kindles up to them: its virtue has to soak into the mind insensibly; and to this end there needs a long, smooth, quiet fellowship.
PRINCIPLES OF ART.
The several forms of Art, as Painting, Sculpture, Music, Architecture, the Poem, the Drama, all have a common root, and proceed upon certain common principles. ”

“ How true it is that art expressions are the mute speech of genius, and genius is but another name for inspiration. It has been said "back of the artist is art, and back of art is that which men name God." ”

“ 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." ”

“ Moreover, as this personage is the most captivating, the most important and the most conspicuous of all, it is he whom artists present to the public, now concentrated in an ideal personage, when their art, like painting, sculpture, the drama, the romance or the epic, is imitative; now, dispersed in its elements, as in architecture and in music, where art excites emotions without incarnating them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One perceives in such states as were there revealed that the true “artist” has not always been known among his fellow human beings, moving upon the world of thought, influencing other lives by the beauty and harmony of their own natures, these seem, when viewed from the spirit, to constitute the real artists. ”

“ MANY persons of culture and poetic imagination, with a keen sense of the beautiful, but with little knowledge of living nature, believe and maintain, and in one sense justly, that certain works of old and modern masters are works of high art, from color, grouping, elegance of figures, and the various accessories which, in themselves, or by ideas and emotions excited by them, make painting and sculpture very powerful agents in instructing and elevating kind. ”

“ Now this possibility of storing for later use, of increasing by combination, the impressions of beautiful things, makes art—and by art I mean all æsthetic activity, whether in the professed artist who creates or the unconscious artist who assimilates—the type of such pleasures as are within our own keeping, and makes the æsthetic life typical also of that life of the spirit in which alone we can realise any kind of human freedom. ”

“ These admirable and wonderful artists contrived to enclose within the narrow limit of a little stone all the complicated details of an event in history, or of a fable in mythology; and to make them stand forth in beautiful relief as a cameo, or to sink them down as an intaglio, with all that truth of design and power of expression which characterize the excellence of the largest works of the most consummate masters. ”

“ I have spoken of poetry, but all the other modes of art produce similar effects in their degree. The races and nations whose senses are naturally finer, and their sensuous perceptions more exercised, than ours, receive the same kind of impressions from painting and sculpture: and many of the more delicately organized among ourselves do the same. All the arts of expression tend to keep alive and in activity the feelings they express. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Just as art, in order to be manifest, must be embodied in the particular work, as the statue, the picture, the building, the drama, the symphony, so the human spirit becomes operative in the person of the individual, and temperament may be best studied in the character of the individual artist. ”

“ There are some artists who, though possessed of extraordinary mastery over the materials of their art, bring to their work a spirit which beggars and belittles both art and life; there are others who seem to work with an ever-present sense of the noble purpose of their vocation and the pathos and dignity of existence. ”

“ And so he has much for those who value highly the concentrated presentment of passion, who appraise men and women by their susceptibility to it, and art and poetry as they afford the spectacle of it. Breaking from time to time into the pensive spectacle of their daily toil, their occupations near to nature, come those great elementary feelings, lifting and solemnising their language and giving it a natural music. ”

“ To be an artist—it dawned upon him that this was his true vocation. To renounce pleasure and discipline the mind; to live a life of self-denial, submitting himself humbly to the inspiration of the great masters.... ”

“ Turn where we will throughout the volume, we find traces of beauty, tenderness, and truth; true poet's work, touched and refined by the master-hand of a real artist, who shows his genius even in trifles."—Standard. ”

“ 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?” ”

“ 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. ”

“ AND now we come to that great and important subject, the Fine Arts, which day by day are becoming more appreciated and find a rapid increase of patrons. It is true that there are some who do not regard Art as an essentiality, and who are even indifferent to it as an ornament. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now take the function of the artist, of the man who in stone, or music, marble, bronze, paint, or words, can express himself, and his vision of life, truly and beautifully. Can we set limit to his value? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Otherwise, the world will never trouble themselves about you, or will very soon forget you. A celebrated artist of the present day, whose name is engraved at the bottom of some of the most touching specimens of English art, once had a frame-maker call on him, who, on entering his room, exclaimed with some surprise, ‘What, are you a painter, sir?’ The other made answer, a little startled in his turn, ‘Why, didn’t you know that? ”

“ It made his art, as it formed and controlled all the processes of his art, leaving the indelible record of individual and personal feeling upon the delicate beauty of every face that he pressed into his service. ”

“ By art they meant the making of beauty for the adornment and enrichment of human life, and as artists they meant to strive against all that was ugly or mean or untruthful in the life of their own time. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Already, indeed, something like such a state has been reached among certain of those who minister to our æsthetic gratifications. The artist of genius—poet, painter, or musician—is one who obtains the means of living by acts that are directly pleasurable to him, while they yield, immediately or remotely, pleasures to others. ”

“ How eagerly the poet, the painter, the sculptor, would seek to recover some traits of their terrible lineaments, or of their softer outlines when they related to scenes of the gentler passions or of domestic life!—that either a stern grandeur or the romantic glow of a primitive state of existence might be imparted to some work of art. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Whilst, at the same time, it is not disallowed that a subsequent pleasure may and does result, upon reflecting that the objects contemplated were the work of human ingenuity.
Now the subject to be treated, is the ‘subject’ of Painter and Sculptor; what ought to be the nature of that ‘subject,’ how far that subject may be drawn from past or present time with advantage, how far the subject may tend to confer upon its embodiment the title, ‘High Art,’ how far the subject may tend to confer upon its embodiment the title ‘Low Art;’ what is ‘High Art,’ what is ‘Low Art’? ”