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Artists As Exiles Within Their Comunity
Exile means to be away from one's home (i.e. city, state or country), while either being explicitly refused permission to return and/or being threatened by prison or death upon return. It can be a form of punishment.
It is common to distinguish between internal exile, i.e., forced resettlement within the country of residence, and external exile, deportation outside the country of residence.
Exile can also be a self-imposed departure from one's homeland. Self-exile is often depicted as a form of protest by the person that claims it, to avoid persecution, an act of shame or repentance, or isolating oneself to be able to devote time to a particular thing.
John F Kennedy - " The great artist is thus a solitary figure. He has, as Frost said, a lover's quarrel with the world. In pursuing his perceptions of reality, he must often sail against the currents of his time. "
The Profound/Professional
Professional artists are obligated to deal with the art world that money built. I have become fond of describing artists who live and work with their focus on the art alone as profound artists. Many professionally "great" artists will be cast aside by history as social eccentricities of their popular culture. All of the tabloid/gallery noise and socially relevant tea parties celebrating cultural politically appropriate presentations, basically funnel the money. As money is so important, the values of art for the benefit of art alone, get rather lost in the shuffle. My respect for profound artists is an on going re-invigoration of my own work. These individuals embrace a life of commitment and honorable fortitude. Certainly many professionally successful artists are also profound, however the obvious numbers of extraordinary artists who choose a lesser traveled path gives pause to ponder.
The Artist As A Spiritual Connection
Many anthropologist, sociologists, and historians have viewed artists as spiritual interupreters of their social group and time. Certainally the soul of a civilization has been defigned in history by it's art. Partly because that is what has remained, and partly because comunication is central to art.
Repeseentative to God.
There are central themes in the definition of humanity artists seem to be concerned with. The hero seeks fulfillment of destiny. This fate
fulfilled confirmed the meaning of life. The need to justify the suffering the hero sees all around him is a basic human need. As the
technology of communication and increased perception evolves, so the mission of the hero must adjust. The artist hero as spiritual scout in
the frontier of fate, brings the case for human existence before the Gods/or God. The mission of the human evolution toward spiritual
realization is blessed, or approved by an extension of the human right to life. In this aspect the artist is separate from organized
religion which is most often viewed historically as a powerful political entity shaping events in societies. The artist is most often
powerless in that as individuals their quest is private and personal. The art contact of an observer who appreciates the artists quest
similarly takes on the personal qualities of an intimate discovery of life. Often these personal discoveries can not be shared. Sometimes a
universal chord is struck which inspires. Perhaps as a spiritual connection a small personal discovery is all we need.
Quotes On The Artist In Society
Oscar Wilde - "All art is quite useless."
Einstein - "No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it."
Luis Bunuel - In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important."
Kenneth Clark - " It remains true that Michelangelo's intensely personal use of the nude greatly altered its character. He changed it from a means of embodying ideas to a means of expressing emotions; he transformed it from the world of living to the world of becoming. And he projected his world of the imagination with such unequaled artistic power that its shadow fell on every male nude in art for three hundred and fifty years. Painters either imitated his heroic poses and proportions or they reacted against them self-consciously and sought a new repertoire of attitudes in the art of fifth-century Greece. In the nineteenth century the ghost of Michelangelo was still posing the models in art schools. "
Aristotle -
"The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance."
Auguste Renoir -
"One must from time to time attempt things that are beyond one's capacity."
Auguste Rodin
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Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which Nature herself is animated.
Brancusi -
"What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things . . . it is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface."
Camille Pissarro -
Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.
Leo Tolstoy - "A really artistic production cannot be made to order, for a true work of art is the revelation . . . of a new conception of life arising in the artist's soul, which, when expressed, lights up the path along which humanity progresses."
Charlie Chaplin -
"There are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books."
Guillaume Apollinaire - "It is the social function of great poets and artists to continually renew the appearance nature has for the eyes of men."
John Ruskin - "Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together."
Pablo Picasso - "We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth."
Joseph Campbell - "The function of the artist is the mythologization of the culture and the world. In the visual arts there were two men whose work handled mythological themes in a marvelous way: Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso."
Hans Hoffman - "A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world."
Hans Hoffman - "The aim of art, so far as one can speak of an aim at all, has always been the same: the blending of experience gained in life with the natural qualities of the art medium."
Robert Motherwell - "One might truthfully say that abstract art is stripped bare of other things in order to intensify it, its rhythms, spatial intervals, and color structure. Abstraction is a process of emphasis . . . Nothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art could have come into existence, save as the consequence of a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need. The need is for felt experience -- intense, immediate, direct, subtle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic."
Paul Gauguin - "The work of a man is the explanation of that man. Hence two kinds of beauty: one that results from instinct and another which would come from studying. The combination of the two, with its necessary modifications, produces certainly a great and very complicated richness ."
Piet Mondrian - "There are, however, many who imagine that they are too fond of life, particular reality, to be able to suppress figuration, and for that reason they still use in their work . . . figurative fragments . . . [But] to love things in reality is to love them profoundly; it is to see them as a microcosmos in the macrocosmos. Only in this way can one achieve a universal expression of reality. Precisely on account of its profound love for things, nonfigurative art does not aim at rendering them in their particular appearance."
Francis Bacon - "A picture should be a re-creation of an event rather than an illustration of an object; but there is no tension in the picture unless there is the struggle with the object."
Edvard Munch - "Art is the opposite of nature.'
Hans Hoffman - "Philosophically, every work which possesses intrinsic greatness is at once decorative and symphonically focused and integrated."
Jackson Pollock - "Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement."
Vincent Van Gogh - "I often think the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day."
Wassily Kandinsky - "Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul."
Winslow Homer -
"There is no such thing as talent. What they call talent is nothing but the capacity for doing continuous work in the right way."
Piet Mondrian - "The only problem in art is to achieve a balance between the subjective and the objective."
James Ensor - "Reason is the enemy of art. Artists dominated by reason lose all feeling, powerful instinct is enfeebled, inspiration becomes impoverished and the heart lacks its rapture. At the end of the chain of reason is suspended the greatest folly .
Thomas Merton - "Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time."
Juan Gris - "You are lost the instant you know what the result will be."
Emil Nolde - "A work becomes a work of art when one re-evaluates the values of nature and adds one's own spirituality."
Emile Zola - "Art is nature seen through a temperament."
Anaïs Nin - "We don't see things as they are; we see things as we are."
Henri Matisse - "What interests me most is . . . the human figure. It is through it that I best succeed in expressing the nearly religious feeling that I have towards life."
Georges Braque - "One does not imitate appearance; the appearance is the result."
Hans Hoffman - "Every creative act requires elimination and simplification. Simplification results from a realization of what is essential."
Paul Gauguin - "In art one is concerned with the condition of the spirit for three quarters of the time; one must therefore care for oneself if he wishes to make something great and lasting."
Giorgio de Chirico - "Although the dream is a very strange phenomenon and an inexplicable mystery, far more inexplicable is the mystery and aspect our minds confer on certain objects and aspects of life. Psychologically speaking, to discover something mysterious in objects is a symptom of cerebral abnormality related to certain kinds of insanity. I believe, however, that such abnormal moments can be found in everyone, and it is all the more fortunate when they occur in individuals with creative talent or with clairvoyant powers. Art is the fatal net which catches these strange moments on the wing like mysterious butterflies, fleeing the innocence and distraction of common men."
John F Kennedy - " When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment. The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state. The great artist is thus a solitary figure. He has, as Frost said, a lover's quarrel with the world. In pursuing his perceptions of reality, he must often sail against the currents of his time. This is not a popular role. If Robert Frost was much honored in his lifetime, it was because a good many preferred to ignore his darker truths. "
© 2009 Glen River Publications
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