"The Shape of Content", Ben Shahn
"Art has roots in real life. Art may affirm its life-giving soil or repudiate it wholly. It may mock as bitterly as did Goya (...). Art may luxuriate in life positively and affirmatively with Renoir, or Matisse, or Rubens, or Vermeer. It may turn to the nebulous horizons of sense-experience with the Post-Impressionists, the Cubists, the various orders of Abstractionist, but in any case, it is life itself as it chances to exist that furnishes the stimulus for art.
That is not to say any special branch or section of life. Any living situation in which an artist finds material pertinent to his own temper is a proper situation for art. It would not have made sense for Paul Klee to have followed the boxing circuit (...). Yet each of these artists found in such casual aspects of reality a form of life, a means to create an oeuvre, to build a language of himself, his peculiar wit and skill and taste and comprehension of things.
While I concede that almost every situation has its potential artists, that someone will find matter for imagery almost anywhere, I am generally mistrustful of contrived situations, that is, situations peculiarly set up to favor the blossoming of art. I feel that they may vitiate the sense of independence which is present to some degree in all art."
*
"Art should be well-subsidized, yes. But the purchase of a completed painting or sculpture, the comissioning of a mural -or perhaps the publication of a poem or a novel or the production of a play- all these forms of recognition are the rewards of mature work. They are not to be confused with the setting up of something not unlike a nursery school in which the artist may be spared any conflict (...)
*
Art arises from something stronger than stimulation or even inspiration. (...) It is through such conflicts that his values become sharpened; perhaps it is only through such conflicts that he comes to know himself at all. It is only within the context of real life that an artist (or anyone) is forced to make such choices. And it is only against a background of hard reality that choices count, that they affect a life, and carry with them that degree of belief and dedication and (...) spiritual energy that is a primary force in art.
*
the merely intuitive kinds of knowing, the esnsing of things which escape classification, the self-identification with great moods and movements in life and art and letters may be lost or obliterated by academic routine. They are not taught but rather absorbed through a way of life (...). Fir it is just that inexact knowing that is implicit in the arts.
*
(...) one of those stories which, told in detail, without any emotionalism being present in the writing itself, manages to produce a far greater emotional impact than would a highly coloured account.
*
(a woman who is escaping someone's house during the fire) whose face I saw, dead-white in all the reflected color.
*
Only the individual can imagine, invent or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals. (...) In the work of art he finds his uniqueness affirmed.
*
"I know there must be an ingredient of complete belief in any work of art - belief in what one is doing.
*
(Hablando del Surrealismo y como esta corriente quiere crear arte desde el inconsciente) But the great failure of all such art, at least in my own view, lies in the fact that man's most able self is his conscious self - his intending self. (Because) the values of man, if he has any at all, reside in his intentions, in the degree to which he has moved away from the brute, in his intellect at its peak and in his humanity at its peak.
*
(explaining something) ... which, in my own view - and what other view has an artist? - ....
*
(Form in art) is the visible shape of all man's growth; it is the living picture of his tribe at its most primitive, and of his civilization at its most sophisticated state.
*
Rilke:
For the sake of a few lines one must see many cities, men and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings which one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents that one had to hurts when they brought some joy and one did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illness that so strangely began with a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars - and it is not yet enough if one may things all of this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, one must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to blood within us, to glance, to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves- not until then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
(From the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rilke).
*
To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matte.
*
(Form in art) stem out of the human wish to formulate ideas, to recreate them into entities, so that meanings will not depart fitfully as they do from the mind, so that thinking and belief and attitues may endure as actual things.
*
However glorious the history of art, the history of artists is quite another matter. And in any well-ordered household the very thought that one of the young may turn out to be an artist can be a cause for general alarm. It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospect of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a good many devoted art lovers to rout.
*
Nonconformity is not only a desirable thing, it is a factual thing. One need only remark that all art is based upon noncomformity. (...) But it seems to be less obvious somehow that to create anything at all in any field, and especially anything of outstanding worth, requires noncomformity, or a want of satisfaction with things as they are. The creative person -the nonconformist- may be in profound disagreement with the present way of things, or he may simply wish to add his views, to render a personal account of matters.
*
The artist occupies a unique position vis-à-vis the society in which he lives. However dependent upon it he may be for his livelihood, he is still somewhat removed from its immediate struggles for social status or for economic supremacy. He has no really vested interest in the status quo.
The only vested interest-or one might say, professional concern- which he does have in the present way of things rests in his ability to observe them, to assimilate the multifarious details of reality, to form some intelligent opinion about the society or at least and opinion with his temperament.
(...) He must mantain an attitude at once detached and deeply involved.
(...)
But besides perceiving these things, the artist must also feel them. Therein he differs from the scientists, who may observe dispassionately, collate, draw conclusions, and still remain uninvolved. The artist may not use lines or colors or forms unless he is able to feel their rightness. If a face or a figure or a stretch of grass or a formal passage fails in that sense, then there is no furthery authority for it and no other standard measurement. So he must never fail to be involved in the pleasures and desperations of mankind, for in them lies the very source of feeling upon which the work of art is registered. Feeling, being always specific and never generalized, must have its ouwn vocabulary of things experienced and felt.
It is because of this parallel habits of detachment and of emotional involvement that artists so often become critics of society (...) and why they are so likely to be nonconformists in their personal lives. Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Rembrandt were all noted noncomformists, each one of them expanding freely the set of limits of mind and art and behavior.
*
One of the earliest of such testaments was painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the early 1300s spreads over the three vast walls of the Council Chamber in the Palazzo Pubblico di Siena. Sins of bad government and virtues of the good.
*
Without the nonconformist, any society of whatever degree of perfection must fall into decay.
(...)
But I do not wish to underrate the importance of the conformist himself (=conservative). In art, the conservative is the vigorous custodian of the artistic treasures of civilization, of its established values and its tastes. (...)
It is natural and desirable that there should occur some conflict between these two kinds of people so necessary to each other and yet so opposite in their perspectives.
*
Noncoformity is the basic pre-condition of art, as it is the precondition of good thinking and therefore growth and greatness in a people.
*
I remember a story that my father used to tell of a traveler in thirteenth-century France who met three men wheeling wheelbarrows. He asked in what work they were engaged and he received from them the following three answers: the first said, "I toil from sunup to sundown and all I receive for my pains is a few francs a day." The second said, "I am glad enough to wheel this wheelbarrow for I have been out of work for many months and I have a family to support." The third said, "I am building Chartres Cathedral."
*
How is tehe viewer of art to know what to look at seriously; how shall he evaluate what he sees?
We turn to the critic, to the historian, to the scholar, to the aesthetician, in other words, to the expert, hoping that he will provide us with some basis of appreciation, some true set of values for art.
*
Let us face it honestly: to have no values, no preferences, no enthusiasms would be simply to react to no art and to enjoy none.
*
I too cherish the word freedom. But I want to be free to be painstaking if I want to, to be responsible, to be involved; to be free to exercise whatever intellect I may have, and I consider both discipline and craft indispensable to freedom.
*
Related to these is the ideal of achievement without effort. I myself have never known a painter or known of a painter whose carrer was not distinguished by prodigious labor, by the sacrifices of all advantages and personal welfare to the accomplishing of the work which he had in mind.
*
I feel that each work of art -each serious work- has an innate value. (Perhaps it is this that distinguishes art from other phenomena.) The work of art is the created image and symbol of a specific value; it was made to contain permanently something that was felt and thought and believed. It contains that feeling and nothing else. All other things have been excluded.
*
The values that reside in art are archaic; they are very man's loves and hates and his moments of divine revelation. The apprehension of such values is intuitive, but it is not a built-in intuition, not something with which one is born. Intuition in art is actually the result of a prolonged tuition. The so called "innocent eye" does not exist. The eye at birth cannot percieve at all, and it is only through training that it learns to recognize what is sees. The popular eye is not untrained; it is only wrongly trained- trained by inferior and insincere visual representations.
*
It is in pursuit of truth perhaps that we are able to sacrifice present values and move on to new ones.
*
Read everything that you can find about art except the reviews.
Listen to preachers in small town churchers and in big city churches.
And remember that you are trying to learn to think what you want to think, that you are trying to coordinate the mind and the hand and the eye.
By all means, have opinions.
*
Perceptiveness is the outstanding quality of a cultured man or woman. Perceptiveness is an awareness of things and people, of their qualities. (...) But the capacity to value and to percieve are inseparable from the cultured person.
*
The artist or novelist or poet adds to the factual data the human element of value.
*
Being integrated, in the dictionary sense, means being unified. I think of it as being a little more dynamic -educationally, for instance, being organically interacting. In either sense, integration implies involvement of the whole person, not just selected parts of him; integration, for instance, of kinds of knowledge (history comes to life in the art of any period); integration of knowledge with thinking -and that means holding opinions; and then integration within the whole personality -and that implies holding some unified, philosophical view, an attitude toward life.
*
The artist of the Renaissance had no great problems of style comparable to those which plague the young artist of today. He might simply follow the established manners of painting as most artists did. If his powers were greater or his vision more personal he expanded the existing manners of painting to meet his needs. But the artist today, and particularly the young one, feels challenged to be unique.
*
Require the three basic capacities: first, of perceptiveness (a recognition of values, a certain kind of culture), second, a capacity for the vast accumulation of knowledge, and third, a capacity to integrate all this material into creative acts and images. The future of art assuredly rests in education -not just one kind of education but many kinds.
*
What shall I paint?
"Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel." But to go a little deeper, such a question seems to indicate an absence of opinion, or perhaps it indicates a belief that painting ought to be this or ought to be that, that there is some preferred list of appropiate subjects. Again, I think that many young people if they were asked "What do you believe, or hold most dear?" would reply honestly, "I don't know." And so we again go back to our first outline for an education: "In college or out of college, read, and form opinions."
In the absence of very strong motives and opiniones, the solution arrived at by the student or young artist who does not know what to paint is that he simply copies or produces a replica of what some other artist has painted before. Ultimately, however, even in this process there seems to take place a kind of self-recognition -if the young person continues to paint at all. He finds some elements among his eclectic choices which are expressive and meaningful to him. Gradually his own personalit emerges; he develops beliefs and opinions. One might say, through his own somewhat stumbling creative efforts he gradually becomes an integrated person.
How shall I paint it?
I could teach him the mixing of colors, certainly, or how to manipulate oils or tempera or water color. But I certainly could not teach him any style of painting -at least I wasn't going to. Style today is the shape of one's specific meanings. It is developed with an aesthetic view and set of intentions. It is not the how of the painting but the why. To imitate or to teach style alone would be a little like teaching a tone of voice or a personality.
Craft itself, once an inexorable standard in art, is today's an artist's individual responsibility. Craft probably still does involve deftness of touch, ease of execution -in other words, mastery. But it is the mastery of one's personal means. Freedom itself is a disciplined thing. Craft is that discipline which frees the spirit; and style is the result.
What security can I have as a painter?
No one can promise success to an intended painter. Nor is the problem of painting one of success at all. It is rather one of how much emphasis one places upon self-realization, upon the things that he thinks. The primary concern of the serious artist is to get things said-and wonderfully well. His values are wholly vested in the object which he has been creating. Recognition is the wine of his repast, but its substance is the accomplishment of the work itself.
There are many kinds of security, and one kind lies in the knowledge that one is dedicating his hours and days to doing the things that he considers mosts important.
For whom does one paint?
Oh yes, for himself, that is obvious. The painter must fulfill his own personal needs and must meet his own private standards. But whom actually does he reach through his paintings?
I suppose that the tangible public of any artist is confined to a circle of persons of like mind to himself, perhaps never a large circle. (...) The sense of reality and meaning in any person's life and his work is probably vested in a community of some sort wherein he finds recognition and affirmation of whatever he does.
*
More than anyone else, the young person embarked upon such a career needs a community, needs its affirmation, its reality, its criticism and recognition. (...)
In the case of an older artist, one who has done a great deal of painting, his own work may be in a strange sort of way come to constitute for him a certain kind of community.
(...)
The public function of art has always been one of creating a community. That is not necessarily its intention, but it is its result.
*
The incidental items of reality remain without value or common recognition until they are symbolized, recreated and imbued with value.
That is not to say any special branch or section of life. Any living situation in which an artist finds material pertinent to his own temper is a proper situation for art. It would not have made sense for Paul Klee to have followed the boxing circuit (...). Yet each of these artists found in such casual aspects of reality a form of life, a means to create an oeuvre, to build a language of himself, his peculiar wit and skill and taste and comprehension of things.
While I concede that almost every situation has its potential artists, that someone will find matter for imagery almost anywhere, I am generally mistrustful of contrived situations, that is, situations peculiarly set up to favor the blossoming of art. I feel that they may vitiate the sense of independence which is present to some degree in all art."
*
"Art should be well-subsidized, yes. But the purchase of a completed painting or sculpture, the comissioning of a mural -or perhaps the publication of a poem or a novel or the production of a play- all these forms of recognition are the rewards of mature work. They are not to be confused with the setting up of something not unlike a nursery school in which the artist may be spared any conflict (...)
*
Art arises from something stronger than stimulation or even inspiration. (...) It is through such conflicts that his values become sharpened; perhaps it is only through such conflicts that he comes to know himself at all. It is only within the context of real life that an artist (or anyone) is forced to make such choices. And it is only against a background of hard reality that choices count, that they affect a life, and carry with them that degree of belief and dedication and (...) spiritual energy that is a primary force in art.
*
the merely intuitive kinds of knowing, the esnsing of things which escape classification, the self-identification with great moods and movements in life and art and letters may be lost or obliterated by academic routine. They are not taught but rather absorbed through a way of life (...). Fir it is just that inexact knowing that is implicit in the arts.
*
(...) one of those stories which, told in detail, without any emotionalism being present in the writing itself, manages to produce a far greater emotional impact than would a highly coloured account.
*
(a woman who is escaping someone's house during the fire) whose face I saw, dead-white in all the reflected color.
*
Only the individual can imagine, invent or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals. (...) In the work of art he finds his uniqueness affirmed.
*
"I know there must be an ingredient of complete belief in any work of art - belief in what one is doing.
*
(Hablando del Surrealismo y como esta corriente quiere crear arte desde el inconsciente) But the great failure of all such art, at least in my own view, lies in the fact that man's most able self is his conscious self - his intending self. (Because) the values of man, if he has any at all, reside in his intentions, in the degree to which he has moved away from the brute, in his intellect at its peak and in his humanity at its peak.
*
(explaining something) ... which, in my own view - and what other view has an artist? - ....
*
(Form in art) is the visible shape of all man's growth; it is the living picture of his tribe at its most primitive, and of his civilization at its most sophisticated state.
*
Rilke:
For the sake of a few lines one must see many cities, men and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings which one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents that one had to hurts when they brought some joy and one did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illness that so strangely began with a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars - and it is not yet enough if one may things all of this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, one must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to blood within us, to glance, to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves- not until then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
(From the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rilke).
*
To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matte.
*
(Form in art) stem out of the human wish to formulate ideas, to recreate them into entities, so that meanings will not depart fitfully as they do from the mind, so that thinking and belief and attitues may endure as actual things.
*
However glorious the history of art, the history of artists is quite another matter. And in any well-ordered household the very thought that one of the young may turn out to be an artist can be a cause for general alarm. It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospect of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a good many devoted art lovers to rout.
*
Nonconformity is not only a desirable thing, it is a factual thing. One need only remark that all art is based upon noncomformity. (...) But it seems to be less obvious somehow that to create anything at all in any field, and especially anything of outstanding worth, requires noncomformity, or a want of satisfaction with things as they are. The creative person -the nonconformist- may be in profound disagreement with the present way of things, or he may simply wish to add his views, to render a personal account of matters.
*
The artist occupies a unique position vis-à-vis the society in which he lives. However dependent upon it he may be for his livelihood, he is still somewhat removed from its immediate struggles for social status or for economic supremacy. He has no really vested interest in the status quo.
The only vested interest-or one might say, professional concern- which he does have in the present way of things rests in his ability to observe them, to assimilate the multifarious details of reality, to form some intelligent opinion about the society or at least and opinion with his temperament.
(...) He must mantain an attitude at once detached and deeply involved.
(...)
But besides perceiving these things, the artist must also feel them. Therein he differs from the scientists, who may observe dispassionately, collate, draw conclusions, and still remain uninvolved. The artist may not use lines or colors or forms unless he is able to feel their rightness. If a face or a figure or a stretch of grass or a formal passage fails in that sense, then there is no furthery authority for it and no other standard measurement. So he must never fail to be involved in the pleasures and desperations of mankind, for in them lies the very source of feeling upon which the work of art is registered. Feeling, being always specific and never generalized, must have its ouwn vocabulary of things experienced and felt.
It is because of this parallel habits of detachment and of emotional involvement that artists so often become critics of society (...) and why they are so likely to be nonconformists in their personal lives. Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Rembrandt were all noted noncomformists, each one of them expanding freely the set of limits of mind and art and behavior.
*
One of the earliest of such testaments was painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the early 1300s spreads over the three vast walls of the Council Chamber in the Palazzo Pubblico di Siena. Sins of bad government and virtues of the good.
*
Without the nonconformist, any society of whatever degree of perfection must fall into decay.
(...)
But I do not wish to underrate the importance of the conformist himself (=conservative). In art, the conservative is the vigorous custodian of the artistic treasures of civilization, of its established values and its tastes. (...)
It is natural and desirable that there should occur some conflict between these two kinds of people so necessary to each other and yet so opposite in their perspectives.
*
Noncoformity is the basic pre-condition of art, as it is the precondition of good thinking and therefore growth and greatness in a people.
*
I remember a story that my father used to tell of a traveler in thirteenth-century France who met three men wheeling wheelbarrows. He asked in what work they were engaged and he received from them the following three answers: the first said, "I toil from sunup to sundown and all I receive for my pains is a few francs a day." The second said, "I am glad enough to wheel this wheelbarrow for I have been out of work for many months and I have a family to support." The third said, "I am building Chartres Cathedral."
*
How is tehe viewer of art to know what to look at seriously; how shall he evaluate what he sees?
We turn to the critic, to the historian, to the scholar, to the aesthetician, in other words, to the expert, hoping that he will provide us with some basis of appreciation, some true set of values for art.
*
Let us face it honestly: to have no values, no preferences, no enthusiasms would be simply to react to no art and to enjoy none.
*
I too cherish the word freedom. But I want to be free to be painstaking if I want to, to be responsible, to be involved; to be free to exercise whatever intellect I may have, and I consider both discipline and craft indispensable to freedom.
*
Related to these is the ideal of achievement without effort. I myself have never known a painter or known of a painter whose carrer was not distinguished by prodigious labor, by the sacrifices of all advantages and personal welfare to the accomplishing of the work which he had in mind.
*
I feel that each work of art -each serious work- has an innate value. (Perhaps it is this that distinguishes art from other phenomena.) The work of art is the created image and symbol of a specific value; it was made to contain permanently something that was felt and thought and believed. It contains that feeling and nothing else. All other things have been excluded.
*
The values that reside in art are archaic; they are very man's loves and hates and his moments of divine revelation. The apprehension of such values is intuitive, but it is not a built-in intuition, not something with which one is born. Intuition in art is actually the result of a prolonged tuition. The so called "innocent eye" does not exist. The eye at birth cannot percieve at all, and it is only through training that it learns to recognize what is sees. The popular eye is not untrained; it is only wrongly trained- trained by inferior and insincere visual representations.
*
It is in pursuit of truth perhaps that we are able to sacrifice present values and move on to new ones.
*
Read everything that you can find about art except the reviews.
Listen to preachers in small town churchers and in big city churches.
And remember that you are trying to learn to think what you want to think, that you are trying to coordinate the mind and the hand and the eye.
By all means, have opinions.
*
Perceptiveness is the outstanding quality of a cultured man or woman. Perceptiveness is an awareness of things and people, of their qualities. (...) But the capacity to value and to percieve are inseparable from the cultured person.
*
The artist or novelist or poet adds to the factual data the human element of value.
*
Being integrated, in the dictionary sense, means being unified. I think of it as being a little more dynamic -educationally, for instance, being organically interacting. In either sense, integration implies involvement of the whole person, not just selected parts of him; integration, for instance, of kinds of knowledge (history comes to life in the art of any period); integration of knowledge with thinking -and that means holding opinions; and then integration within the whole personality -and that implies holding some unified, philosophical view, an attitude toward life.
*
The artist of the Renaissance had no great problems of style comparable to those which plague the young artist of today. He might simply follow the established manners of painting as most artists did. If his powers were greater or his vision more personal he expanded the existing manners of painting to meet his needs. But the artist today, and particularly the young one, feels challenged to be unique.
*
Require the three basic capacities: first, of perceptiveness (a recognition of values, a certain kind of culture), second, a capacity for the vast accumulation of knowledge, and third, a capacity to integrate all this material into creative acts and images. The future of art assuredly rests in education -not just one kind of education but many kinds.
*
What shall I paint?
"Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel." But to go a little deeper, such a question seems to indicate an absence of opinion, or perhaps it indicates a belief that painting ought to be this or ought to be that, that there is some preferred list of appropiate subjects. Again, I think that many young people if they were asked "What do you believe, or hold most dear?" would reply honestly, "I don't know." And so we again go back to our first outline for an education: "In college or out of college, read, and form opinions."
In the absence of very strong motives and opiniones, the solution arrived at by the student or young artist who does not know what to paint is that he simply copies or produces a replica of what some other artist has painted before. Ultimately, however, even in this process there seems to take place a kind of self-recognition -if the young person continues to paint at all. He finds some elements among his eclectic choices which are expressive and meaningful to him. Gradually his own personalit emerges; he develops beliefs and opinions. One might say, through his own somewhat stumbling creative efforts he gradually becomes an integrated person.
How shall I paint it?
I could teach him the mixing of colors, certainly, or how to manipulate oils or tempera or water color. But I certainly could not teach him any style of painting -at least I wasn't going to. Style today is the shape of one's specific meanings. It is developed with an aesthetic view and set of intentions. It is not the how of the painting but the why. To imitate or to teach style alone would be a little like teaching a tone of voice or a personality.
Craft itself, once an inexorable standard in art, is today's an artist's individual responsibility. Craft probably still does involve deftness of touch, ease of execution -in other words, mastery. But it is the mastery of one's personal means. Freedom itself is a disciplined thing. Craft is that discipline which frees the spirit; and style is the result.
What security can I have as a painter?
No one can promise success to an intended painter. Nor is the problem of painting one of success at all. It is rather one of how much emphasis one places upon self-realization, upon the things that he thinks. The primary concern of the serious artist is to get things said-and wonderfully well. His values are wholly vested in the object which he has been creating. Recognition is the wine of his repast, but its substance is the accomplishment of the work itself.
There are many kinds of security, and one kind lies in the knowledge that one is dedicating his hours and days to doing the things that he considers mosts important.
For whom does one paint?
Oh yes, for himself, that is obvious. The painter must fulfill his own personal needs and must meet his own private standards. But whom actually does he reach through his paintings?
I suppose that the tangible public of any artist is confined to a circle of persons of like mind to himself, perhaps never a large circle. (...) The sense of reality and meaning in any person's life and his work is probably vested in a community of some sort wherein he finds recognition and affirmation of whatever he does.
*
More than anyone else, the young person embarked upon such a career needs a community, needs its affirmation, its reality, its criticism and recognition. (...)
In the case of an older artist, one who has done a great deal of painting, his own work may be in a strange sort of way come to constitute for him a certain kind of community.
(...)
The public function of art has always been one of creating a community. That is not necessarily its intention, but it is its result.
*
The incidental items of reality remain without value or common recognition until they are symbolized, recreated and imbued with value.