The
artist teaches that the object of a man's life should be to play as a
little child plays.
The real study of an art student is mote a development of that sensitive nature and appreciative imagination with which he was so fully endowed when a child, and which, unfortunately in almost all cases, the contact with the grown-ups shames out of him before he has passed into what is understood as real life. -Robert Henri
The real study of an art student is mote a development of that sensitive nature and appreciative imagination with which he was so fully endowed when a child, and which, unfortunately in almost all cases, the contact with the grown-ups shames out of him before he has passed into what is understood as real life. -Robert Henri
The Inner Child
To a
child all the different colors are a romance, and romance is all that
is true.
When I was a child, everywhere it was announced that: 'the future had arrived.' (Then how is it furure?) My youth was the decade of the:'jet aircraft,' 'manned space flights' and powerful cars named after ponies. 'Peanuts'
was politically 'in' and Charlie Brown and Lucy took on a life far beyond the Sunday comics. Technology was marketed to everything a child might ever imagine.
Closer to home our T.V.offered all the heady reality of technology. For todays big fat crayons between little fingers, we had stuff like 'Winky Dink' offering all the technological thrill a child could ever want. Forget Jon Gnacy with his U-tube like drawing demonstrations; here was interactive technology long before its time.
Children are of course known for both frugality and insatiable creativity. Since few children had bank accounts, much less any economic prowess, there probably sold few erasable transparent screens to draw along with 'Winki Dink' your colored fantasies on a B&W screen.
But no matter, like so many others, a marker on the screen was all a child really needed, and no doubt to the bemusment of my mother, the show was soon canceled. Permitting all else from the 'Rifleman' to 'Twilight zone' here was one show she no longer permitted. But the story underscores a perennial theme in my life that would consume all my later studies; the line where reality ends and imagination begins.
Though everyone else sat nightly like matins before the tv looking at 'reality,' (At least Marlow Perkins version where as a great cover for Disney there would be endless closeups of animals copulating,) my childhood was frantically active outside the house. In 1973 I found myself dumbfounded before a Rembrandt painting at the Getty museum. No they didn't have technology then, much less photography, but here was a portrait of the 'Man with a golden Helmet,' manifestly more real than reality itself. 'How could that be?,' I asked, as I studied but colored canvas.
'Why could not a photograph do that,' I then asked myself. There was no answer, but later in speaking of 'dignity' Billy Joel said it could not be photographed. Technology was a sealed book of a truncated reality.
One Sunday morning the same year, when all the children were at Sunday mass, and personally feeling as especial tinge of Catholic guilt, I was recording on my new stereo tape deck a mix of what I considered really beautiful music. I searched far and wide, all hours of day and night, and this day I was searching out an early morning rock show out of San Diego. Strangely a classical piano piece from a contemporary rock musician immediately spoke to be everything religion ever deigned. That morning an aesthetic sense was awakened in me, that has never departed. For me art is visual poetry.
Beauty exists, an ontological reality as certain as matter, and as inviolable as truth. In an age where technology has supplanted imagination, such an assertion might seem incredulous, but all such technological truths may very well go the way of the 8 track tape player or pop up toaster. If not a contradiction in terms, technological philosophy may one day go the way of babies lighted by storks, or more drastic 'bloodletting'.
Reality is in fact, multi dimensioned and art touches far beneath the surface of things. As Robert Henri said: '. A child sees the reality beyond surface or fact, but later in an art school he is taught to see the lines on the surface. Get over this thing of copying the surface. You must not see your subject, but through it.' (The Art Spirit) Henri here states a truth no technology has yet conceded.
Children are also known for another thing, one perhaps long ago forgotten by the onslaught of rampant technological 'progress,' specifically, that lost virtue of childlike innocence. Perhaps this is something else Billy might have sung against but, absolutely integral all art that ever was and ever shall be. Art is innocence.
Art finally at end is no attempt to draw the lines of reality, whether as perceived on tv, or anywhere else, but a reflection of insatiable, if not childlike imagination. Art is however, anything but childlike, invoking and engaging all the developed and highly refined powers of the soul. Contrary the often empty claims of modern digital technology, traditional photography is both pre technological and classical.
Classical photography is to me as a guilty Sunday morning quest, the visual equivalent of the song and movement of the heart, a musical note as lofty as a gothic cathedral, and as eternally momentous as worship, and like some mediaeval cloth of Edessa, as permanent as spirit impregnated platinum metals amalgamated canvas, or the souls imaginative steps singing their rhythm on the golden streets of the heavens.
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