Art and the Artist…
June 28, 2009 by sovereignjohn
A Belt is Fourth Dimension’s Unfinished Business
Posted by: “Glen E. P. Kealey” thesculptor2005@yahoo.ca
Sat Jun 27, 2009 1:45 am (PDT)
A Belt is Fourth Dimension’s Unfinished Business
POLARIS STOOL SHE-D (4) NOT 3-D
From Hermaphrodite Clan Mother to Pseudo Bagperson Suspenders
In the fourth chapter of his ‘Poetics’ Aristotle says, “Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by imitation. And it is also natural for all to delight in works of imitation.” By “works of imitation,” Aristotle meant works of art. This included products of human skill that are now regarded as technological. Other terms he could have used for imitation are “representation” and “depiction.”
The 16th-century English poet Thomas Overbury said simply, “Nature is God’s. Art is man’s instrument.” About 300 years later the English critic John Ruskin noted, “Art does not represent things falsely, but truly as they appear to mankind.” “Art is the child of nature,” wrote the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
The shoe imitates the foot and the glove the hand.
Plato, in his “Sophist” dialogue, remarked that the painter is able to imitate anything in the world, and it is true that a painter’s choice of subjects is virtually unlimited–landscap
Imitation, in this sense, does not mean duplication. A real house is three-dimensional, but a painting of the house, though only two-dimensional, could still be a realistic representation. Sculpture, which is three-dimensional, makes a closer approximation of reality, but it lacks the life of what it depicts.
“I paint what I know is there.”
To paint what one sees is a description of art as imitation.
Picasso’s rather cryptic statement clouds the issue of imitation and puts the origin of artistic creation entirely within the artist. The artist’s goal is self-expression, not necessarily imitation of any feature of the outer world. Both the inspiration and the subject matter derive from within. Or the artist may be trying to distill the essence of what is seen, to create an abstraction of its qualities.
The Gothic art of the Middle Ages was abstract to some degree in that it did not pretend to depict literal reality. It was intent on portraying religious symbolism, but the abstractions were not so removed from normal experience that they were not easily recognizable by the viewers. Abstract portraits of saints and depictions of events in the life of Jesus had become familiar to viewers by long association.
Bing, Being, Boeing, Beijing, Bang
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The SculPTor (1776-1867)
WWW.WORDSCULPTOR.NET aka WWW.KEALEY.NET
Web Site of Glen Kealey, National President
Canadian Institute for Political Integrity (CIPI)
http://www.wordsculptor.net/web/previous/kealeynet/content/index4.html
UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE THIS WORDSCULPTOR
POST IS BEING BLOCKED (censored) BY HOST
Ipower (Phoenix /via India) — their server FIDO continuously drops
the connection)
June 27, 2009
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