Relief (art)

“ 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? ”

“ And yet I pine;—this beautiful completeness
⁠Is incomplete, to my desiring heart;
'Tis Beauty's form, without her soul of sweetness—
⁠The pure, but chiseled loveliness of art.
There is no longer pleasure in emotion.
⁠I envy those dead souls no touch can thrill,
Who "painted ships upon a painted ocean,"—
⁠Seem to be moved, yet are forever still. ”

“ What if these dying, melancholy cadences, which so melt and sink into the heart, be—what we may so naturally interpret them—the melodious sinkings of a deep-seated and hopeless unhappiness! Nay, the fancy is too wild for even a dream. But are there none of those fine analogies, which run through the whole of nature and the whole of art, to sublime it into truth? ”

“ The stream is bound fast and the wolds are chill;
And by the dead flats, where the cold blasts moan,
A bent body wearily plods alone.
THE PATHOS OF ART. Oft seeing the old painters' art,
We find the tear unbidden start,
And feel our full hearts closer grow
To the far days of long ago.
Not burning faith, or godlike pain,
Can thus our careless thought enchain;
The heavenward gaze of souls sublime,
At once transcends, and conquers time.
Nor pictured form of seer or saint,
Which hands inspired delight to paint;
Art's highest aims of hand or tongue,
Age not, but are for ever young. ”

“ It is an art which, in its best development, adds immeasurably to the conscious pleasure of life. It is an anodyne in hours of suffering, a rest in hours of weariness, and a stimulus in hours of health and joyous activity. ”

“ A voice of comfort breathes from sorrowing Earth
⁠If winter is the nursery of flowers,
If purity and loveliness have worth
⁠Beyond this world of ours,
If there is pity for the tears we shed,
If any truly live—thou art not dead! ”

“ And next, for any space you would have lost, and for any unavoidable destruction of natural growth, you would in the times of art have been compensated by orderly beauty, by visible signs of the ingenuity of man and his delight both in the works of nature and the works of his own hands. ”

“ PREFACE The source of art is the fountain of Love: the winged spirits, Painting, Sculpture, and Poetry, spring from it hand in hand. With affectionate leave-takings and cries of joy at their liberation, they soar into space, the angel of Music out-winging the rest because of more lambent fibre, but she is no more vital nor pulsating than her sisters. ”

“ In no place or season can the triumph of nature over art be so vividly expressed. The proud fabric of man's ambition, toil, and ingenuity, totters and decays; while the frailest of Nature's works, the delicate flower, whose individual life is but a day, springs, ever renewed, in undiminished vigour. ”

“ But we confess, for our own part, that it is the structure itself that affords us that soft ecstasy of contemplation, sense of a perfection before which the mind stops short, silenced and filled with the completeness of beauty unbroken, which Art so seldom gives, though Nature often attains it by the simplest means, through the exquisite perfection of a flower or a stretch of summer sky. ”

“ The sonnets came to the artist as came his sculptural motifs, through clouds of disappointment, and the sometime failures that must be the accidental notes in life's harmonies for soul enrichment. In later years the inspiring helpful spirit left this world. ”

“ Nowhere else in art is such a temperament revealed; never did inclination and opportunity combine to express such enjoyment. The mixture of flowers and gems and brocade, of blooming flesh and shining sea and waving groves, of youth, health, movement, desire—all this is the brightest vision that ever descended upon the soul of a painter. Happy the artist who could entertain such a vision; happy the artist who could paint it as the masterpiece I here recall is painted. ”

“ CHAPTER XI THE DOMINION OF ART OVER NATURE: PAINTING In literature, as we observed in our last two chapters, nature does not find aesthetic expression on its own account. In the lyric, nature appears only as the reflection of personal moods and thoughts, in the drama and novel and epic only as the theater of human action or the determiner of human fate. In painting and sculpture, on the other hand, the expression of nature is the primary aim. ”

“ But the joy for both the potter and the painter, the joy which is so bound up with art as to partake of its very essence, is the joy which attends self-expression and the satisfaction of the need.
A work of art is a work of creation brought into being as the expression of emotion. The traveler creates not the wood and stone but shelter, by means of the hut; the painter creates not the landscape but the beauty of it; the musician creates not the musical tones, but by means of a harmony of tones he creates an emotional experience. ”

“ The day for tears is past, the fires are red, not flaming; this is a day for steadfast regard, for service, patience, and good hope; this is a day for Art to chant what the soul hath endured. For Art is a fruit sown in action and watered to utterance by tears. ”

“ In the next movement the soul turns to Art—Art in her myriad phases, radiant in beauty, gleaming with the thousand hues of the palette of romance. The soul wanders through scene after scene of ever-changing delight, each one more enchanting than the last. ”

“ Beauty there is in the book; exquisite glimpses into the loveliness of nature here and there shine out from its lines,—a charm wanting which meditative writing always seems to have a defect; beautiful gleams, too, there are of the choicest things of art, and frequent allusions by the way to legend or picture of the religious past ”

“ He finds relief in the discovery that, the moment you place man in the midst of it, the clashing of water-drops becomes a storm, terrible to heart and brain: human thought and feeling, hope, fear, love, sacrifice, make the motions of nature alive with mystery and the shadows of destiny. The relief, however, is but partial, and may be but temporary; for what if this mingling of man and Nature in the mind of man be but the casting of a coloured shadow over her cold indifference? ”

“ So true is it that after long and terrible strains we hail partial relief with such peans of joy that the shadows that remain seem only to temper the light that has burst upon our long darkened vision and to render us only the better able to bear the relief. ”

“ For example, if the vivid green, which is agreeable in itself from the pleasing emotions which have been connected with it, is combined with a scene of melancholy and desolation, where the design of the artist is to awaken other than lively emotions, it appears incongruous and displeasing.
The art of the poet consists in the use of such language as awakens emotions of beauty and sublimity, either by recalling conceptions of various forms, colors, and motions in nature, which are beautiful and sublime, or the strong and powerful, or the soft and gentle emotions of mind. ”

“ To freeze each pulse, and dart thro' every vein,
Cold thrills of fear, keen sympathies of pain;
Yet teach the spirit how its lofty power,
May brave the pangs of fate's severest hour!
Turn from such conflicts, and enraptured gaze,
On scenes where Painting all her skill displays:
Landscapes, by colouring drest in richer dyes,
More mellowed sunshine, more unclouded skies ”

“ Whatever his people might be doing, or if they were not people at all, but variations only of his little slender trees or distant domes and steeples, his art would have been equally high and holy. And this because of its effect, direct, unreasoning, on our spirit, making us, while we look, live with a deeper, more devoutly joyful life. ”

“ Its beauty is in its suggestiveness, which strikes us again in many of the flower-wreathed vases where there are openings of green, into which one can look as into a forest glade. The mind creates what the eye cannot see, and the glade is peopled with beings whose forms are never caught. This is, no doubt, an example of fancy helping out the artist, but the artist is none the less fortunate and skilful who can thus induce the fancy to take wing. ”

“ A quick taking of the breath, the escape of a sigh, inarticulate and uncritical, are the only expression we can find at that instant for what we feel: as when an abrupt turn of the road spreads out before us a landscape of which we had not dreamed, or we enter for the first time the presence of the Apollo Belvedere. We know simply that we are pleased. But after nerves have ceased to tingle so acutely, we begin to think; and we seek to give account to ourselves of the beauty which for the moment we could but feel. ”

“ And yet how solemnizing, how elevating in their influences, are all the highest beauties both of art and nature, notwithstanding the awe, approaching to fearfulness, with which they not seldom affect our spirits. ”

“ How wonderful is the art which can impress upon canvas and so preserve from generation to generation and from century to century, a lifelike presentment of men and women whose flesh and blood realities have long since mouldered dust with dust! ”

“ The purpose of art was, by breaking the routine of habit and making things seem fresh, unexpected and new, to restore a sense of the reality, the physical tangibility of living existence—"to restore the sensation of life, to feel things, to make a stone stony..." ”

“ Seeing Joy light her lamps, and Hope break into blossom, seeing human hearts and human souls cast off the cerecloths and come forth into the fruitful garden. Surely we can await the end with such a Vision Beautiful as that before us, and—who knows?—it may be that in healing the wounds of others we shall find balm for our own. ”

“ The beam in the eye sheds brightness, beauty, and joy upon life in all its phases. It shines upon coldness, and warms it; upon suffering, and comforts it; upon ignorance, and enlightens it; upon sorrow, and cheers it. The beam in the eye gives lustre to intellect, and brightens beauty itself. Without it the sunshine of life is not felt, flowers bloom in vain, the marvels of heaven and earth are not seen or acknowledged, and creation is but a dreary, lifeless, soulless blank.
While cheerfulness of disposition is a great source of enjoyment in life, it is also a great safeguard of character. ”

“ And the blue multitudes of the peaks, the perpetual congregation of the mornes, seem to chorus in the vast resplendence,—telling of Nature's eternal youth, and the passionless permanence of that about us and beyond us and beneath,—until something like the fulness of a grief begins to weigh at the heart.... For all this astonishment of beauty, all this majesty of light and form and colour, will surely endure,—marvellous as now,—after we shall have lain down to sleep where no dreams come, and may never arise from the dust of our rest to look upon it. ”

“ Happy, too, is the painter who is led by love of landscape into solitary paths, and who can make his canvas breathe the feeling of sadness with which he is inspired by a gloomy wood or a desert plain. ”

“ In the process of preparing the ground for those rare moments of illumination wherein we attain the eternal vision the soul is occupied, and the person attempting to think is occupied, with what I call "the difficult work of art" of concentrating its various energies and fusing them into one balanced point of rhythmic harmony. ”

“ Although in different places he indicates a genuine appreciation of the charms of art,—in the form of music, paintings, statues, etc.,—yet he expresses or implies an independence of all the adventitious stimulants to enjoyment. The only needful pleasure is that which Nature herself bestows on a mind free from care, passion, violent emotion, restless discontent, and slothful apathy. ”

“ The power of condensed expression—the faculty of giving vent to "thoughts that breathe in words that burn"—the art of painting, by a line, an epithet, an expression, the inmost and most intense feelings of the heart, is equally indispensable. ”

“ It is the triumph of all art that faithfully as it may represent what it sees, its representations will still be, in large part, functions of the artist’s own mood, so that the same scene, the same event, portrayed by different writers or different painters, may arouse in us emotions as varied as joy, grief or mere restfulness. ”

“ It is this quickness, this delicacy of feeling, which enables us to relish the sublime touches of the poet, and the painter; it is this, which expands the soul, gives an enthusiastic greatness, mixed with tenderness, when we view the magnificent objects of nature; or hear of a good action. The same effect we experience in the spring, when we hail the returning sun, and the consequent renovation of nature; when the flowers unfold themselves, and exhale their sweets, and the voice of music is heard in the land. ”

“ The air-drawn visions that hover on the verge of existence have a bodily presence given them on the canvas: the form of beauty is changed into a substance: the dream and the glory of the universe is made ‘palpable to feeling as to sight.’—And see! a rainbow starts from the canvas, with all its humid train of glory, as if it were drawn from its cloudy arch in heaven. The spangled landscape glitters with drops of dew after the shower. The ‘fleecy fools’ show their coats in the gleams of the setting sun. ”