F.   The Definition – What is a Beautiful Thing?

        Just as a thing is interesting when it engages the participation of the intellect, so is beauty its ability to engage us through the senses which, in our present line of interest, is the sense of sight.

        If we have reached agreement on my live demonstrations, two things will have been made clear.

1. First, we all perceive the music and the screeching the same way once the locations that require action are identified and mended, or you could not have conceded that I had improved anything at all.
2. Second, to ascertain the sites where correction will be needed is a skill which grows more powerful with practice and experience. It was therefore easier for me to do than it could possibly have been for a layman without training.
   

           The true action of this skill is to observe our own responses as we behold a visual
            display. It is the ability to look at ourselves while looking at a thing.


   G.   The Purpose – Why Do We Pursue It?

        If we ask what makes a beautiful thing desirable to have, we get invariably the reply: “It pleases.” So it often does, but decidedly not always: 

1. Matthias Grűnewald’s Isenheim Aaltar Crucifixion is a very embodiment of suffering.
2. And Pucchini’s opera Madama Butterfly ends in tragedy and terrible despair.
3. Against the backdrop of Germany’s declining fortunes of battle and her shattered cities near the end of World War II, the narrator in Thomas Mann’s great novel Doctor Faustus looks upon the parallel devastation of the broken sanity and approaching death of his lifelong friend, the composer Adrian Leverkühn.

• He relates to us how he felt like one of the condemned souls in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment whom a pair of daemons wrenches downward into the abyss. The figure covers but a single eye while glaring insanely through the other, as though he could not endure and bear to look upon this hell he was nonetheless compelled to see.
• The narrator ends these broodings with a prayer of a single sentence:  “May God have mercy upon both your souls – my friend, my fatherland!”

  
             Literature, of all the arts, uses the comprehending intellect as if it were one of our
            senses. For, the reading eye alone would see page by weary page a single basic
            pattern endlessly repeated. But form and composition speak at first to the brain
             itself as if it were purely an organ of reception – a retina and eardrum of the mind.
 

        What unfolds in all my three examples are terrifying tragedies. To be gratified or well-pleased with them would be indeed satanic pleasure – a diabolical amusement. But, even while the heart is saddened, these works can so utterly engage all our mind and feeling that no foreign desires are able to intrude, and no distractions tarnish, the experience. Thus we learn through them a perfection of fulfillment.

1. We can otherwise have a perfection of experience without necessarily beholding a perfect work of art.

• We are capable of giving this fulfilling beneficence to ourselves from something merely good enough to stimulate us to the mental labor of perfecting inwardly what may inherently be flawed. To do this is to make one’s reception better.
• Pictorial composition may deliberately use incompleteness to achieve perfection. We can mentally complete my sphere and cube in the following illustration, though I have rendered them in fragments only.   
• Experiencing perfection without a perfect work of art also can be base and, at its worst, extremely ugly. Cheap entertainment or cheap reading and, most of all, the deadly plague of psychoactive drugs, furnish a perfection of downward self-fulfillment. While these pleasures last, they constitute perfection for the user, because he is incapable of any wider purposes or wishes.

D.   Composition

        The real work of surpassing the material world is done not through a preferred abstraction, which can vary, but by a discipline named severally “design,” “composition,” or “visual organization,” whose ground rules never vary.
        If the tasks of composition were always as badly carried out as they are poorly understood, we should suffer a scarcity of well-done work even greater than we now endure. But our burdens of misunderstanding are real, and work their share of damage.
        The study of visual composition is closely similar to learning Rhetoric in language. If Rhetoric is the study of how to say something persuasively, then Composition in a picture becomes the study of how to show it beautifully.

1. To this purpose we select, alter, and reject visual parts by an aesthetic faculty included as a bonus attribute in our wider capacity for instinctive judgment that we own as a survival tool. This has not much to do with the careless prejudices we acquire of choosing blondes over brunettes or, some years ago, the fashionably favored “Ashley” for naming the daughters of this country.
2. If a weight threatens to fall upon us from a height, we do not squander time to straighten some item of apparel, but leap away as quickly as we may. And there are animals as well as man who will retreat from evil smelling food in favor of more appetizing fare.
3. My preferred example of how composition works differs from that final observation only in its specific parts, but is identical in principle and function:  If we played chamber music against the strident screeching of some mechanism, we should not stop the music in order to get better access to the screeching, but rather, silence the screeching because we want to hear the music.

           
              We should un-learn, as best we may, our socially acquired prejudices, but the
               instinctive operations of the aesthetic sense we have to study, observe, and seek
               to understand.

      4.  Tinkering with my demonstration pictures, I shall not try to establish balance.
             Already the impressionists learned by the snapshot photograph and the Japanese
             woodblock print that this may be a dubious rule. A double portrait may require
             balance. But, as we saw, the profile drawing of a head must prefer the character of
             facial features to the skull in back, and would suffer damage if a rule of balance
             were applied. 
  
              Nor shall I tell you that your eye will move from one point to another. Perceptual
              researchers can – with the assistance of a suitable appliance, show any scan path
              with precision. And it will not often match the claims of artists.

         5.  Rather, my examples try to demonstrate how the screeching may be silenced
               and the music played. But the music sounded here is visual, and the screechings
               are visual distractions, that is, demands for an attention not justified by any
               optical appeal.
   
               A distracting “noise” will not be nearly so interesting as it may be loud – but not
               “loud” necessarily. For whispering too can be an emphatic bother and distraction.
               My process of fitting and adjusting can – to some degree – be duplicated by
               sequential slide transparencies.

                But, for a most persuasive showing, it must be demonstrated live.


   E.   The Action of the Paper Snippets

Relationships differ from place to place. Thus, only within a given setting can we visually judge and mend what is too big by shrinking, too small by making larger, too bright by making duller, and too dull by causing it to shine. Also, what seems shapeless needs to become form-full, and what is vague – and therefore puzzling – be made clear.

1. The gravity of all such faults and measure of their damage can be assessed by the extent of unprofitable notice they command, determining thereby the amount of mending needed in the opposite direction, with smaller errors being not so urgent.
2. In art we aim for and adjust only that which shows, so that the management of emphasis, by showing weightily and showing lightly, becomes the signal skill of composition. An emphasis is here not solely made through visibility and contrast. But the small as well as large, the exceptionally vague or dull as well as the crystal-clear and bright, all can be emphatic.
3. If there is accord among us that my live demonstration pictures have altered for the better, then my paper snippets have rendered them, step by careful step, more beautiful, by letting our visual participation be a little less impeded and more fully possible each time along the way. Thus I have gained, perhaps, some sounding of my music and silenced, in the end, the screeching.

Coherent unity, the desired outcome of this effort, means the best works are best because they have become themselves – that is, without distraction – the full embodiment of all their theme and striving.

      I.   Basic Design within the Foundation Program

        Within the Foundation Program the two semesters of Basic Design are by themselves a compact summary of an artist’s purely visual work of form and color, as opposed to figure or landscape drawing. 

        Apart from the special mission of three-dimensional composing, the Surface Designs divide the language of their visual domains very carefully into the parts of art and gradually join them toward a plane of competence where the student will be no longer a beginner.

        To summarize the tasks of a two-semester Basic Design course:

        Basic Design I:

• Shape arrangement compositions without color.
• The optical behavior of colors and precision training in their use.
• Color composition ending with incipient training in careful observation, but starting with no demands concerning shape 

        Basic Design II:

• Freehand Construction of geometric solids.
• Volume perception and delineation through geometric sections of the whole.
• Composition of volume combinations to articulate spatial advancing and retreating in the action of describing.

    
  J.   Historical Study
      
     1.  Artists need a grounding in Art History to see how cultural excellence – due to causes
            that fundamentally can never vary – appears in every period and all kinds of places.

• Technical knowledge is good – even indispensable – to have for themes involving the especial difficulties technical knowledge must be relied upon to master. Technical knowledge enlarges our range of action rather than improving upon the excellence of our action.

• However, excellence in art essentially does not depend on technique, but rather on the just interpretation of a subject combined with genuine achievement in design. Art History does not equal composition as an essential study, but it does help us and is therefore good to have. Other times and other places had not the learning of the modern West and thus not quite its range, but had equal excellence.

 
     2.  Besides needing the History of Art to train their eyes at discerning other workers’ best
             creations – regardless of how unfamiliar may be the face they wear – artists want this study,
             as every man must want the history  of  his own kind, for the assuring companionship it offers.  

• For all such learning reveals how others – very much like ourselves – have lived and what they did. 

• In our calling we may thus share the triumphs and frustrations of our brother artists through the ages and so take our places in a greatly lengthened life made stronger by a little faith in ourselves and a hope we owe to their example. 

There is no time for me to treat in our framework any useful portion of the History of Art. But we can deal here with the major steps in the development of Western Writing, whose dual heights of excellence must substitute for the miraculous abundance of the history of art which, alas, at present, poses an unwieldy horn of plenty.


        1.  Our Alphabet is the lineal descendant of Phoenician characters, which are thought to go
             back to Egyptian pictographs, or to have been independently contrived in Phoenicia.
             Aleph the bull became Alpha and “A,” Beth – the house, Beta and “B,” Gimel – the camel,
             Gamma and “G,” so that our word “Alphabet” itself is of this North Semitic origin.

        2.  Pictographs are unevenly exact sound-alikes. A picture of a deer could do duty for
              addressing some we are fond of, as in “my dear” and, less precisely, a “gull” as in seagull
              might mean a “girl.” 

             When Aleph, Beth and Gimel turned into Hellenic Alpha, Beta, and Gamma, their names
             became mere pronunciation keys for the initial sound and the Phoenician meanings
             disappeared. Along the way the pictographs grew simpler and more geometric in design,
            and so became true letters.

       3.  Around 200 BC, ill-crafted linear letter skeletons, more of a Latin than of Greek
            appearance, assumed truly geometric character in the centered horizontal bar of “A”
            and the semi-circles of “C, D, S and R.”
 
              The geometric character since then has been preserved, but was modified correctively to
            give aesthetic satisfaction. These changes produced in A.D. 100 the Monumental
           Stone-Carved Roman Capital, with the thicks and thins, as well as serifs of our present day.

       4.  The monumental Roman Capital is the first of two lettering masterpieces we have in
           Western Europe.

• It is, however, a letter suitable for carving but cumbersome to write. Only its thicks and thins – the results of preparatory writing with a chisel-form brush – endure, when the chisel-edged nib takes over throughout the whole development of our second alphabet, of the letters we call “small.”
• The path was gradual, with beautiful pen-forms on the way. Letter shapes grew rounded, in part longer, and eventually slanted, for rapid writing by the pen. The end-product was the Chancery Hand of the High Renaissance, and marks the second crest of excellence in Western writing:
• The whole alphabet went through the paces of my “M” and “F” skeletons, which mark the pathways followed by the pen, without thick and thin resulting from the width of the pen.

        5.  I am indebted here a second time to John Howard Benson – who was the greatest writing
             master this country ever had – for my brief history of lettering. In his understanding, Chancery
             Cursive is the finest possible compromise between the needs of the reading eye and our rapidly
             writing hand.

        6.  Should we venture, perhaps rashly, to design an alphabet of our own, we must consider this
              historic line in order to remain inside the bounds of legibility.

• Yet there is, within those limits, much we can create with the thicks and thins, with clarifying and widened endings modeled by the serif, and with the curving strokes of the rapid, running hand.
• The visual correction taught to us by Rome is simply the design of legible, well differentiated, and yet consistent, elements belonging to one family of forms. And, when we go our own way, we should seek to equal that especial excellence instead of copying the Roman shapes.

 
        If we paint and draw still lifes, landscapes, or the human face and figure and think that lettering can teach us nothing, then we are not true students of the arts we practice. For an excellence a little off-side of our personal striving allows us to dismiss for a while our own designs and can refresh our fatigued and clouded minds, thus crystallizing our judgment and brightening our vision.
        To perceive in other disciplines how he may improve within his own, characterizes the ardent student and true learner.
 
 
 
III   The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing

     A.  Two Questions 

         You owe this portion of the series to a one-time student who wrote me letters with questions about art to which I replied in essay form. One exchange dealt with the theme: “Why do we make art?” Two questions reside within the one:

1. First, what is a work of art? Or, better, what, in the realm of art, is a beautiful thing – as opposed to a beautiful face that is a gift of God?
2. And second, what benefits can a beautiful thing supply that we should feel a powerful compulsion to make a place for it in life?

        Both of these are philosophical concerns, and a philosophic bent of mind will help us to consider them. But philosophic learning all alone cannot succeed, because the task requires also the experience of a working artist.
        Because of this, my discourse will not be exclusively a set of philosophical reflections, nor center only on artistic action. But, giving both their due, we may achieve right understanding and thus reveal most clearly what an artist will find proper and worthwhile to do.


     B.  The Meaning of the Term “Art”  

        Art is a strange word, not for what it means, but what it fails to mean.

1. There are three closely related Latin verbs – “aptare, arctare, and artare.” All mean to join together, as does “articulate” in our tongue.
2. In German, the word “Kunst” is also notable for what it does not mean. It derives from “können,” the German verb for “possibility” – to be able to, or “can.”
3. If we extract meaning, as best we may, from the Latin and the German, a work of art will be a thing ably joined together. Neither the depth of feeling we experience nor that which we express through art are at all delineated by this definition.

           In the great puzzles of existence, groping in the dark may be common in Philosophy. But otherwise, so much groping in the dark is not altogether usual, because language strives for our understanding, and not to deepen the confusion. For example, “lawnmower” and “dishwasher” proclaim at once what these appliances are and the service they deliver.
         My task is to make as precisely clear what art is and it does for us, as the names lawnmower and dishwasher make clear the function of those objects. To make as clear, however, does not mean to state as briefly. On the contrary, I must, to some degree, become substantially long-winded.                   
 
 
    C.  The Claim Implied through Showing Art

1. There is implied a declaration when works of art go on exhibit. The artist tells the viewer: “This is a beautiful and very valuable thing; and therefore I am sharing it with you. For it is something you truly ought to have.”
2. From this claim follows a rule an artist breaks only at great cost. His work – for the purpose of being seen – must outstrip reality. A coffee pot, painted just as it appears, is less than the coffee pot we can also use as well as see. Thus, to be genuinely beautiful, a picture must surpass its subject.
3. We often fail to reach such excellence when we make fervent emotional appeals.  Sweetly sensitive or pompously heroic striving – while design and form are weak – cannot justify the response of feeling they demand. It is this kind of sentimental and heroic overloading which produces what Germans have named “Kitsch” and Americans call “Corn.”

           But learning that a picture of a coffee pot may be worth painting, and worth seeing, can be a
           rich reward.

1. In the Coffee Pot still life, my patterns based upon the play of light are a specialized abstraction. They are a chosen derivation from my scrutiny of nature, which informs me that all the world consists of fields of color whose tonal values I may reduce to black and white.

      8.  Texture: 
 

• Letting go of the sometimes inexact repeating patterns we call textures is best accomplished by an intermediate abating of its description, before it is made to vanish altogether. 

 

• A precisely legible articulation at the boundary seems more essential than any labors carried out within.

 

• Textures are often drawn proportionately larger and number far fewer units than the original in nature. Yet there will be a sense of vaster numbers in the picture than are actually rendered, for reasons worth exploring:  Twenty people on St. Peter’s square will be a dot here and a dot there and dots in a few other places. But in the confines of your living room the twenty will constitute a considerable throng and so will twenty figures, or twenty of some other repetition, within the limits of a picture.

        6.  Detail and Mass: 
              We grasp readily how spherical sections derived from the latitudes and longitudes
              of the globe render its form legibly and clearly. But any pattern may be altered to conform to any
              surfaces. For the most complex configurations do only three things against the perspective grids
              we can inscribe upon all forms:

• The parts of shapes either parallel, incline, or curve against the grid. They are thus able to reveal how they function in the perspective situation of each form. The lines of grids can also intersect at various – indeed, unlimited – inclinations to each other, so that reasonable practicality and visual appeal determine shape as well as grid design.
  

      H.   Two-Dimensional Design, Second Term 

1. Volume and Space Perception:  Progressive systematic learning was in the Renaissance brought to bear on every field of study, and sought to put man’s entire visible domain within the artist’s competence and reach. From that time, Western Art separated more decisively from foreign art traditions than these differ from each other.

             This once seamless continuity of learning may now be weakened, because Modern Art inclines more
              to celebrate that man is able to emote and feel instead of his ability to reason, know and understand.
             To emote and feel is no achievement – we may as well take pride in the possession of an alimentary 
              canal. What I feel may gradually grow apparent; but what you and I can learn and understand together
              is the reason for this program.

        2.  Abstraction: The self-understanding of Modern Art regards abstraction as its central innovation, but
              its grasp of what that really is seems very vague at best. For Modern Art has sought to tell us that
              Abstraction equals progressive Non-Representation, where the least recognizable equals the most
              abstract.

• The visual arts have no monopoly upon abstraction, because abstraction illuminates with clarity very various endeavors. If I describe to you an outing with fine sights and many pleasures, I should focus on the highlights while deleting dull and trivial detail. Far from any aim of non-representation I should want to isolate the quintessence of the action and experience of my outing to show more plainly why it gave me joy.

• Similarly, we can reduce to their essentials our visible surroundings and say the whole world is made up of areas of dark and light, or we may choose to see it wholly as abutting fields of color. For my aims in Basic  Design II, all the world is my source, once more, for the derivation which I call Abstraction. But here the work is technically more demanding than it was before.

        3.  The First Operation of Abstraction: A dog, a tree, a table and a stone differ sharply from each other
               but share a property of cubic magnitude. They each possess Height, Depth and Width – the attributes
               of Volume. Thus, Volume is a signal Derivation from the unwieldy visible abundance of the world
               and – here particularly the Abstraction of Dog, Tree, Table and Stone. 

• To make this abstraction visible on the level page, a favorable angle of regard has to be selected. For, if a cube shows only a single face, we see a square and not a volume. But when we rotate or tilt the cube to offer more sides than just one – preferably in asymmetric combination – its three-dimensional character is made clear. 

• My linear likenesses of Geometric Solids below, and the Human form shown in an earlier illustration, are literally an isolation of the sparse essentials of their three-dimensionality from all distractions and confusions that clutter our world.
  

II    The Transmission of Knowledge   (cont'd)

F.   The Basic Designs

1. Three-Dimensional Design is not sculpture, but teaches only the control of sculptural surfaces and the proper relationship between technical action and the materials chosen for the job. It teaches also that a great simplicity can be very beautiful – not because elaborate magnificence is to be disdained – but that a handsome thing can be had at a great deal less expense. In building my own furnishings, I have used this training in simplicity with profit. But I have never taught this demanding discipline of composition whose results must give satisfaction from all angles, and I therefore hold no views about which inclusions – in what order – provide the best instruction.  

• Three-Dimensional Design makes possible the study of what materials want to do on account of what they are. Modern materials are a multitude that we cannot manage in a college course. But two or three simple, inexpensive ones ought to be observed very closely and precisely under the instrumental action of the student’s tool. 

• This principle of responsiveness to the exactions and the possibilities of a material cannot be learned from a supermarket of material substances, each considered only briefly and as swiftly once again abandoned. But a small representative selection will serve the student well when, on day in the future, he seeks to impose his creative will on substances today unknown.

 
             But I have never taught this demanding discipline of composition whose results must give
              satisfaction from all angles, and I therefore hold no views about which inclusions – in what
              order – provide the best  instruction For Three-Dimensional Design.   


     2.    Two Dimensional Design:    

• Art has committed, and will continue to commit, many stylish follies as wayward as spiked heels with pointed toes for ladies’ shoes – that must, in time, deform the foot – and as silly as the mini-skirt. The obsession with the whims of fashion has caused the truly pioneering revolution in the Modern Visual Arts to neglect its best achievement – and that may have cost us a great deal.

• Very early in the modern movement it was recognized that a Line, a Shape, and a Field of Color have aesthetic merit in themselves and deserve to be subject of an artist’s effort and display. The study of what such autonomous pictorial elements have power to perform was never undertaken. Instead they were much used with little understanding, although at times with beautiful results. So entangled seemed each succeeding generation with the fashions of their day that the full potential of these acknowledged visual parts remains, to this day, largely unexplored, and their range unknown.

• To mend that failing is a sternly structured task and, on that account, cannot likely have a welcome in modern education. But, in the intimate circle of this modest class, maybe we can try that venture.

 
  G.   Two-Dimensional Design, First Term

        A study with the aim of constituting the enabling fundament of all the labors of the colorist and draftsman is an ambitious plan. But Basic Design will either be of basic value to the wider tasks of art or else becomes a detour and superfluous delay. Yet our beginning will be unpretending and extremely simple.
        Two-Dimensional Design, First Term, is pursued with least expensive materials and tools, but is capable of covering the widest range of visual learning.

1. Composition starts as shape arrangements in humble black and white, but the turn to color occurs quickly. Color compositions are first made by combining rectangular paper snippets of the most various size and color, and so eliminating the separate demands of joining complex shapes.
   

       2.  The Work in Color falls into Two Divisions:  

• The smaller of the two is technical, and teaches the constituents of mixtures and exactitude in using them, as well as the surprising optical behavior of color combinations when placed side by side.

• The most useful of the technical assignments is the Color Change, by which a single color may so alter its appearance against different ground that we must call it different names. The Color Change alerts the artist that the material pigment content is only a sham of facts in art, while its truth is what appears to the viewer.  

        3.  Similarly there are visual illusions by which straight lines seem to bend and parallels both to
              spread  and to converge. Thus, to correct unwanted optical effects, the work I show is always
              done freehand.  For even the boundaries of solid shapes are subject to this fooling of the eye.
              Both the color and the line visual effects follow a familiar rule:  If we eat a spoon of honey
              and then bite into an orange, in comparison with that sweet predecessor, the orange will
              taste sour as a lemon.


          4.  My second great teacher, Josef Albers, deserves mention here. From him stem the Color
                Change and other valuable color demonstrations, as well as one signal tenet of visual
                 expression, of which the following example will give you an idea – though its specific form
                 is mine:  “When you draw a profile portrait,” he might say, “give to me the person – not the
                 skull in back – but the identifying features to the front!” This means that off-theme emphasis
                 can be as damaging to pictures as it would be misleading in the spoken tongue. 

• Composition is often taught by curious rules:  Supposedly there must be balance, focal points, but there must not be any signal element at the center. Or, it is said that the eye moves from here to there in an unending guesswork that could be settled by an electronic instrument capable of tracking down the scan path with precision. Artists proclaim they set up tensions, resulting chiefly in the destructive harm we call distraction. 
  

• The failure of such precepts shows in their wide following without a product of very much distinguished art. We should be glad that not every artist practices this kind of thing – although he may like to say he does – or we should lack good work even more than we already do. 

 

• My Pyramid below stresses by adjusted contrasts the characteristic rising edges, while diminishing the baseline margins. And so it articulates that showing visually closely parallels the lowering and rising volume of common human speech.

      3 .  (Descriptive Geometry, cont'd)

             Since every basic study prepares the way for more advanced instruction, we should take
            note – whether or not a given art school offers it – what this advanced work ought
            to be: In Descriptive Geometry that is the combination of volumes in a study
            the Intersection of Form, and the scientific study of light, including – beyond light
            and shade –  Mirror Optics and Refraction.
     

II    The Transmission of Knowledge

A.   Dexterity Training

        Today objects of utility are products of industrial virtuosity and “know-how,” and the machines that shape them are the vastly powerful offspring of the classical tools designed for manual use. The computer may permit a parallel industrial development also in the Fine Arts toward which, at present, there is both skepticism and enthusiasm.

        We must admire the sheer technical magnificence that the computer has made so readily available. But the seeing eye is subtler than we easily observe and may find eventually something bleak and arid in endless repetitions of computer “fireworks.” It would be a sad result, if all the love and adulation lavished today on the computer, brought to us tomorrow a nostalgia movement for the second time around, because our prevailing culture of that day will be too sterile and too feeble to nurture our souls.

1. The Parallel Good of different skills: The skills of the computer artist may differ partly from those of workers like myself trained in the use of hand-held implements applied directly to the materials. But the computer artist also has to learn to suit his instruments and his materials to the purposes he strives to gain. That universal rule can be demonstrated by any skill employed towards however disparate aims.

        2.  Skill Training in Calligraphy and Drawing:  I have known only a single Drawing Course prescribing exercises,
              in the form of drills, for manual control. Instead, Calligraphy has generally taken up that task to much good
              purpose, so that, even in my drawing courses, I have included letter forms for dexterity instruction.   

             Dexterity improves to varying degree with any art work we perform – but only over time, so that, in the
             present series of four speeches, I cannot help you to become more skillful. But I may attempt to add a
             little to what we understand.

B.   Intellect and Will

        Will, Intellect and Intuition are used as words so confidently that it is easy to be unaware how little we were ever taught about them. Though the will cannot determine what the knowledge of a subject is, this knowledge cannot constitute itself without the energy of the will.

1. A Drafty Place:  The intellect appears to be a drafty place in which incoherent thought particles or fragments of awareness would blow at random in and out if they ignited no curiosity or interest – that is, emotion – urging us to develop and advance them.

      2.   The Will:  Not all feelings are emotional. For we can receive them in happy timespans of fulfillment while
              emoting nothing.

• The Mutual Enablement of Will and Reason:  When an awareness triggers our curiosity – that is, the incipient will to know and comprehend – and thus sets us on a path of intellectual pursuit, we can say that emotion here reacts to a stimulation and, in its turn, stimulates and drives this mental action. Reason and Emotion are therefore not antagonists forever locked in combat, but can be mutually enabling and sustaining.
• The Emoting Will:  Besides a seed of thought, Will can be set in motion by greed, compassion, hatred, affectionate attraction and so on. That is, an emotion can stimulate emotion. For, the will shares with these specific passions the trait of seeking to express itself through striving for an outcome. That is to say, the will emotes, and only an emotion is capable of that.
• The Alliance of the Will and Reason:  While the Intellect is but a drafty chamber, the will resembles most of all a shark in feeding frenzy. It is at all times in pursuit. And, given their unprepossessing separate natures, it is no surprise that Will and Intellect together may be conscripted for every class of evil and of folly as well as for the good.

             Solely our fads and fashions – inspiring annually prodigies of drive and clever planning, should persuade
             us how frivolously one may employ both intellect and will. The emoting Will can enslave and put the
             Intellect to work for any cause.

        3.  Education:  In youth our unattached emotional energy surges in every direction. And through education –
              not by the schools alone, but in the sense of an ancient wisdom out of Africa that it takes an entire village
              (a whole society) to raise a child – we must hope to reach that vast reservoir and powerful potential.

• Compulsory Instruction and Self-Expenditure:  Early instruction aimed at propriety and learning is, as well as it ought to be, a series of compulsions that require youth to invest their work in Right Knowing – thus to honor signal truths – and in Right Doing, to learn the value of good will as our source for just as well as prudent conduct.

             We do not like to hear this anymore; but, much as this pill is at present being sugared, the reality is still
             one of requirements – though we meet them badly – and not just personal bent and impulse.
             Eventually, self-expenditure can help youth to cherish the good products of their labor more than any
             ready pleasures falling unearned into their empty lives, and to cherish also in a little way themselves as
             people who have worked faithfully to learn to behave properly and labor thoroughly and well. And so
             the personality begins to grow into an enduring likeness of the way we live and work.

• When we are thus prepared to walk on our own a path of proper action, we have from time to time rich periods that take us further than the reach of any pedagogic guidance.

 C.   The Three Ways of Seeing as Three Ways of Learning

        The Three Ways of Seeing would be:  Naturalistic Seeing – through Observation; Derivative Seeing – from Experience; and Original Seeing – as a Creative Vision. This last inclusion is owed to John Howard Benson’s course. When we call these three divisions the Three Ways of Learning, some of them may gain a little ground.

1. Naturalistic Learning is Right Knowing gained through personal observation.

      2.   Derivative Learning is a discipline of Prudence, or Right Doing, as well as of Right Knowing, gained from
             our teachers rather than from Nature. It is the Learning transmitted through an education based on past
             experience, and its value is two-fold:

• The transmission of knowledge far beyond the scope any human being owns years enough to assemble for himself, and thus an admirable saving of man’s time, descended as an offspring.
• The teaching that we have, in any line of work, no actual freedom to accomplish what we wish to do, except by our unstinting and precise obedience to the conditions which render our wishes possible. Thus, by endless object lessons, our will is schooled to welcome prudent discipline as the path of our freedom for gaining our purpose and desire.

             Good Education will always help the student to succeed, because the material is already proven – even
             the most up-to-date, at the time of teaching, is confirmed. So, if he masters it and learns to work with it,
             the student cannot really fail.

        3.  Original Learning: To profit as abundantly as possible from listening to others, we must listen also to
              the voice of our personal understanding – that is, to ourselves.  

              A self-created pattern of sensible, experimental forecasts must now provide the guidance to a deeper
              understanding and a more useful, nobler product.
              That achievement is the work of intuition that I must now describe in some detail. Useful intuition
              comes mostly to the well-prepared.
 
D.   The Pathway of a Partly Failing Intuition

1. The page I offer here following records one of my intuitions in the act. Whether intuition succeeds or fails, the advancing paces of its operation remain, in principle, forever constant.

• Figure 1 sets down the perspective knowledge I owned already at the start. From there I ventured the intuitive prediction that I might delineate all forms by perspectively gaining and reducing particles.
• The sphere and cube of Figures 2 and 3 are readable results and were, by odd coincidence, utilized close to the same time in paintings by Victor Vasarely, who had no idea my prototypes existed.
• Figure 4 aims at the top view of a cone, but does not yield a fully legible construction.
• The more I change the angle of regard to approach the apex to the distant outline – Figure 5, the less space remains for graphic treatment; and, with increasing complexity of volume combinations, the method utterly breaks down, so that – in this pure form – I made no further use of it.

 

           
G.   Perfection, Compromise and Wear

1. Compromise: The perfection of an artifact is not bound by a single function but by several that are traded off against each other: A pitcher permits us to transport a liquid as a solid and ought also to dispense this liquid without spillage. Its interior should be easily accessible for cleaning and its handle so positioned and so shaped that its weight is manageable and its pouring inclination easily controlled.
2. Wear: Even a thoroughly made thing composed of best materials is, in the end, reduced through use to its final material substances and then discarded by the owner. Wear – the deformation of an artifact through use – can be long delayed, but not entirely avoided. A favorable Pace of Wear goes with function and – as a good desired by the patron – is required for completion of the job.

H.   The Integrity and Wholeness of a Perfect Thing

        The constraints of compromise and wear are difficulties which we may dismiss once we have managed them as well as circumstance allows. But we can center ourselves so narrowly on practical utility that we are scarcely able to endure and live with our functional creations.

        Unsightliness – through irritating or distracting and thereby weakening the user – impairs the function of an object. Moreover, artifacts are not just with us when they do their work, but also at their idle periods. Thus, among their varied functions, that of giving satisfaction to the viewer who beholds them has to be included. An artifact is made completely – that is, wholly finished and in that sense perfect – when visual excellence and utility are joined.

        When a man-made thing thus embodies an optimal reply to each of the user’s sensible requirements, it will bear wholly the character of all that it is made to be. It will be itself. That is, within the constraints of its own integrity, it will be perfection, in quite a similar sense that geometric shapes also can be perfect. A circle, for example, will be perfect within the limits of its own identity, because it is unsurpassable in its character of circularity.

I.   The Excellence of Art

        Visual excellence is an attribute of all good art toward one especial function, namely, that of being seen. It is essential in both the applied as well as fine arts, and consists at least of two requirements.

1. Proportion: The just relationship of visual parts is an expression of proportions resulting from the artist’s power to compose by using as a guide his own attentively observed involuntary attractions and repulsions. These are not intuitions, experimentally predicting possibilities, but instinctive reflex actions, such as those which cause us to withdraw from a foul or rotten smelling food but to surrender eagerly to the appealing smell of fresh-baked bread.

           Neither are they predilections in a sense of taste by which we may be fonder of peaches than
           of grapes and prefer blonde girls to brunettes.
          Just proportionality gives to us the unimpeded visual coherence of a thing and hence its ready
           legibility.      (This should be demonstrated live.)

      2. Clarity:  However, clarity is an intrinsic property of the work itself and therefore no more
           dependent upon who can look at it with understanding than is the legibility of writing to be
           judged by those who do not know their letters. For clarity inheres in the exactitude of the
           artist’s reconstruction of his purpose in visible material form. Clarity brings illumination into
           our minds and is there loved by our understanding.        Clarity does not mean an expression
           is directly understood but only that it is amenable to comprehension. However, since we
           mostly want to understand any subject we consider, we love lucidity for granting us what
           we desire.

J.   The Common Foundation

        The Basic Designs – both two and three dimensional – are a line of learning aimed at Visual Literacy pursued by students in every field of art but thereafter put to different uses. All able expression of visual literacy is valuable and deserves a place in art. But the different art disciplines do not, on that account, produce interchangeable results.

      1.  Pictorial Limitation:        
            I cannot put my pictures to work to pour coffee or bicycle myself downtown. But, equally, I
            cannot put the artifacts suitable for these two uses to the assignments that pictures may
            perform. 

       2.  Pictorial Expression: 

• A friend called my Little Steamer in Distress by the name of The Little Tug That Could, and thus read most precisely my intention of articulating tenacious pluckiness in the face of towering adversity. A whole drama of the elements unfolds within the limits of a private space:

       2.   Pictorial Expression (cont’d)  

• Demons over Moby Dick takes up Melville’s many times repeated phrase “the demoniac fish.” My strange beings in the sky are thus the Demon Allies helping the Demoniac Fish in his demoniac work.

      2.   Pictorial Expression (cont’d)  

• Winged Demon and Demonic Monolith are both malevolent and threatening. But the winged creature must find his victims and close his talons on them bodily, while the Demonic Monolith, his furnace eye flashing open in the late afternoon, will work an imponderable but far greater menace at long range.