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The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 10

5/27/2016

THIS WEEK –
A short section finishes some of the detailed discussion, including pictorial composition, before next week’s FINAL summation.

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.

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.
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.
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.

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.
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.
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.

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The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 09

5/20/2016

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During the past several weeks, Johannes gave detailed descriptions of Basic Design courses. Here, after some final thoughts, the essay returns to philosophical topics - aesthetics. (NINTH of eleven sections)

      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:

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?
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.

There are three closely related Latin verbs – “aptare, arctare, and artare.” All mean to join together, as does “articulate” in our tongue.
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.”
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

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.”
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.
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.

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.

Comment:
Has some other discipline offered you insight into the practice or appreciation of visual art?

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The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 08

5/13/2016

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END of Middle of Essay – Illustrated section on Basic Design, last Segment
The reader may consider the current long, illustrated section to be a digression. Johannes describes courses for Basic Design in the Visual Arts suitable for both art students and those in other fields of study.
After this last Segment the Essay returns to more general discussion of art education and art theory.

H. Two-Dimensional Design, Second Term (cont'd)

7. Motion: Blur passages of movement are observable chiefly in rapid reciprocal and rotated motion which tend to render the moving parts unreadable.

Relying on the action of the body, a runner may be described firmly and completely and yet give the impression that reminds us of great speed. But the pure form of my two spheres, despite their blurs of motion, is almost at a stand-still.

In my continuous Hill and Dale design, the valleys appear nearly as a running brook by their fragments of description. Thus I obtained a rapid sense of motion where I did not plan for it, and failed to gain it where that was my intention.

Either through shape design or the increasing weight of line, directions can be shown, as in my spinning cube, now sufficiently dissolved in structure to be capable of speed.

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.

9. Form Articulation: Basic Design II as a college course includes neither motion nor texture, but ends
with form articulation.

When direct use is made of this signal gain in conventionally drawn or painted work, it will be good to learn that a shape can blend into its neighbor and yet the blending run a firm and shapely path.

Most of all, the study of volume description here makes optimal use of the compositional experience of the First Semester and, clearly, both are wonderfully practical for good work in all the things drawn or painted later.

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The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 07

5/6/2016

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Middle of Essay – Illustrated section on Basic Design, 3rd of 4 Segments
The reader may consider the current long, illustrated section to be a digression. Johannes describes courses for Basic Design in the Visual Arts suitable for both art students and those in other fields of study.
After these 4 Segments the Essay returns to more general discussion of art education and art theory. Rather than omit this section, it is included as part of the original essay.

        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.

6. Detail and Mass (cont’d)

My overall repeated line descriptions gave me, after considerable struggle, a single way to draw all forms. But here—by a flash of intuition – I strolled, almost at my ease, into an enabling insight for rendering all forms in all possible ways.

             Since the limits of a shape configuration are linear, suitable line elements – as my human profile
             shows – can render form as readily as solid areas.

6. Detail and Mass (cont’d)

Depth relationships can be expressed by merest hints, so that stress of visibility must rather fall upon the labors best able to reward the viewer.

6. Detail and Mass (cont’d)

This task my Boulders at the Shore below tries to carry out at the change of elements where solid ground and sky strip meet in the considerable distance. The sharpened focus upon distant sights is also a function of the eye, as well as of the camera, and familiar to photographers. But a precise consistency of the descriptive weight with every point in space – as the earlier example of my Partly Failing Intuition showed, is nearly always an impossibility.

It is not a law of light direction which rules description but the geometrically precise relationship between the parts and the whole – that is, between detail and mass. My demonstrations thus intend to pose a model or prototype of Basic Knowledge for the treatment of all objects at once massive and detailed – that is, literally everything we see. But it bears repeating here that the play of light – which we do not need for clear articulation – is an inexhaustibly rich source that we may draw upon as if it were an entire “spare imagination.

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The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 10

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