Category: Fine Arts

The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 09

5/20/2016

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 - 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 - 05

4/22/2016

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Middle of Essay – Illustrated section on Basic Design, divided into 4 Segments.
     The reader may consider the next 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.

II The Transmission of Knowledge (cont'd)

F. The Basic Designs

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.

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.

4. Composition rules (cont’d)

Albers’ insight proved of the greatest service. For I found a way to stretch its clarity into a basic compositional principle of just a little wider range. How this works cannot be shown to full effect with slides, and I shall therefore teach it to you live with “Paper Snippets,” before this series ends.

5. My composition course is a melding of two minds, Albers’ and mine.

Much of the work is done in colored paper, to furnish the most experience in the quickest time.

But some problems are designed for paint, notably a task beginning with a splash and splatter party on large sheets. Out of all these messes, small areas are selected, enlarged, and re-composed. The student learns here careful observation, and starts to grasp his personal limits. For, when he is encouraged to devise any shapes and colors to his liking, he is not even capable of wanting – that is, imagining – the shape configurations he draws upon for this assignment. It is hoped that he will thereby first begin to value the vast visual abundance of the world that surrounds him on all sides as if it were a “spare imagination.”

There are further problems in which the number of areas and colors is strictly limited; but the solution must give no impression of constraint, but only of an ample plenitude of color.

In all such work, two classes of corrective action will be carried out. What seems out of order or fragmented is brought into a coherent unity that will not be of dull sameness, but of ever changing pace. Hence, what seems characterless and slack must be more sharply differentiated, as in the frame-by-frame progression of my demonstration page: Quick, short curves alternate with longer, slower ones, corners contribute angularity, while the thick and thin of line, as well as intervals and solid shapes appear.

        5. More on Composition rules (cont’d)

            The viewer re-compounds the unity of a design by his own sustained attention to it. A
             coherence without character – that is, without each part contributing its own unmistakable
             identity – will suffer, despite its blameless unity, a twofold damage of distraction. One will be
             the boredom of the viewer and the other, in any exhibition, the powerful attraction of
             competing better works.

        Any person – perhaps not himself an artist but seeking practical experience to help him look at art with a sharper vision – might profit from this First Semester of Design. For its manageable, rather simple, technical demands recommend the course not only to beginners but also to the amateur and layman. But the reach of this course unfolds fully only in the second term.

NOTE:
(Section on Basic Design Courses to be continued next week)

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The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 01

3/25/2016

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In the early 1990s this was given first as a speech to a class at the Lancaster County Art Association, and in briefer form afterwards on a couple of other occasions. Some of the illustrations come from the text, others from references to physical works that Johannes brought with him, and one from live demonstration. (FIRST of eleven sections)

I     The Artifact and the Art Object

A.   Rules for Right Making in Utility and Art
        In past times distinctions were drawn between products of the Fine Arts and humble Objects of Utility, adding to the latter ever the inferior rank. Much thinking in this century turned this around, proclaiming the well-made artifact the equal of the work of art and, in all essential ways, indistinguishable from it.
        The difficulty may not be amenable to any final settlement. There is a common good desired of them both: We want our furnishings as well as our pictures to be beautiful. But their capabilities and purposes can also differ widely; and that needs to be accounted for before this search for understanding ends. Yet, for our start it will be helpful that the ground rules for creating a good product govern equally the object of utility and one existing solely for its beauty – the Applied as well as the Fine Arts.

B.   John Benson’s Course and the Twin Purposes of All Instruction
        Undergraduates at Rhode Island School of Design in the 1950s studied during one semester a subject called Philosophy of Design. The course was taught by a great man, John Howard Benson. It was beautifully organized, and ably introduced us to a domain of intellectual concern that few artists ever get to know. Also, it fulfilled better than most others the twin purposes of all instruction:

It saved the student time, advancing our understanding far beyond what any of us could have reached on our own in whatever many years; and –
For me, it stimulated the widely-ranging labors of philosophic thought, now making possible this series of talks.

        I have in my possession only skeleton notes of this course, so that the fleshing out will be my work and its failings my responsibility. But my debt would be plain to any who have shared this excellent beginning, and deserves to be acknowledged.

C.   Ways of Delivering the Wrong Results
        When an otter lies upon its back and opens a mussel by breaking the casing with a stone, or a raptor rises to some height and drops its catch to shatter on the ground below, or again, an early hominid seized a rock to cleave with it the brain-case of his game, the deeds appear identical in their complexity of mental action. But they are most dissimilar in their cultural and, in the end, historic consequences. Man alone evolved to overcome, to an extent, the specific limits all other species failed to breach. These, however, remain the causes of inferior work at the hands of man, to the present day. They are:

Ignorance: Inadequate understanding of the problem to be solved in terms of the materials and the tools required, as well as of Technique – that is, the body of orderly procedures demanded by the job.
Lack of Good Will: If our purposes are feeble or we intend to cheat the buyer, the outcome must be flawed.
Lack of Inventive Sensibility: That is, the intelligent discernment of a promising conception, or road to choose – the failure to see beyond what our teachers have transmitted, in the sense of Leonardo’s dogma that “It is a wretched student who cannot surpass his master.”
Lack of Skill: A kinesthetic ignorance, not of the intellect, that is, but of the muscles through want of aptitude or training. Failure to govern our tools as instrumental extensions of the body, that is, of bodily dexterity and strength.

The way we fail by Ignorance, Ill Will, Want of Imagination, and Bodily Ineptitude portrays man as a being who at his best can succeed by all their opposites. That is – by his gifts of Reason, Will, Forward-Looking Vision, and Dexterity. In consequence, man recognizes . . .

D. The Worthwhile and Essential Callings of Man’s Life

Science, or Right Knowing: Assembled by the faculty of intellect, conscious realizations bound by actuality and truth, not subject to the will. I have some comments to contribute later about how knowledge must rely on will to constitute itself. But will is not involved in what is and what is not a truth.
Prudence, or Right Doing: choices made by the faculty of will. It presupposes and depends on knowledge, and we often know much better than we are behaving. We smoke, though we know it devours our lungs. Though we know fattening foods are harmful and will cause us to grow heavy, we eat them all the same. Right Doing calls upon the power of resolve to sustain an appropriately chosen path, that is, upon free will.
Art, or Right Making: It presupposes and depends upon Right Knowing as well as on the Right Resolve, but prospers by the Faculty of Intuition – what I have called Inventive Sensibility – which, forward-looking, takes us from the known to the unknown, and is thereby our means of progress.

        Of all the callings, the Arts are most clearly dependent upon skill, that is, the artist’s corporeal suitability for his work of making.

E.   The Causes of Things Made
        There are reasons, or causes, why Man-Made Things Exist

Final Cause: The beginning, as opposed to the final, form. The end for which a work is undertaken, the problem posted by the patron. The intended function of the object will therefore be a good desired by the user.
Material Cause: The substances from which a thing is made, and without which it would not exist. These are chosen always for their serviceable qualities toward the desired end.
Efficient Cause: The means by which materials are given their appropriate shape through one of the following:

The Material Means, that are the artist’s Tools
Kinesthetic Means, which are the artist’s Skills
Technical Means, which are Instrumental Actions or Techniques that are

                    the employment of the tools in their right relationship to the materials
                    and of the materials to each other.
                   Techniques are the union of the Material and Efficient Causes. Materials
      properly chosen for their purpose are shaped according to what the right
                    tools and materials can suitably be made, and want, to do for a desired end.

         4. Formal Cause: The solution of the problem and its final form are achieved in
               Stages. The Stages are reductions, that is, Abstractions derived from the
               problem posted by the patron. Stages constitute the successive images
               to which the materials must by shaped.

        [Other Causes than those cited as Antecedents of Results –from notes at end of essay:

First Cause – the self-created being and prime mover – God

Immanent Cause – originating or evolving within an entity (Spinoza)
Transient Cause – originating outside the entity affected by it (Spinoza)
Occasional Cause – a desire or resolve as remote cause (occasion) but not an immediate – such as the efficient – cause of an effect.]

F. Stages as Instrumental Intermediate Forms

Stages are thus Instrumental Intermediate Forms. Themselves deliberately simple, they clarify one step at a time the tasks to be performed, so that the greatest complications can be managed. They represent the orderly Division of the Work Path, and serve equally for the tasks of mass production and the creation of unique works in the fine arts.
Through dividing the Work Process into its appropriate sequential forms – each requiring the performance of but simple tasks – the artist is delivered from anxiety and put at rest in his own mind about the progress of the job.

Clarity of planning and simplicity of operations are the purpose of the Stages.

They represent a good desired by the artist rather than the patron.

Only to the degree that tasks have grown accustomed can the required

                  Stages be well known. But for the breaking of new ground, not only
                  knowledge, will, and skill, but also inventive sensibility, is brought to bear
                  to set the correct milestones in their places as the Work Path gradually
                  unfolds. It is here, when we must rely on our uncertain intuitions, that we
                  cannot altogether escape our own uneasiness of mind.

        3. The last of the abstractions that we call a Stage is the Final Form and
               conclusion of the worker’s effort. It represents perfection as a thing complete
               and thoroughly constructed.

               Perfection is here not an attribute divine, but must be rightly understood as a
     property of man-made things within their range of possibilities, that is, within
               the impediments or limits of the job. When the last possible duty is faithfully
               performed, perfection as achieved because we can do no more – the final
               chore and last detail.