Open Writing

Art—skill applied to imitation and design, as in painting, etc., of artistic design, etc., thing in which skill may be exercised

At theological college, we were each assigned a pastoral task to give us some experience of the 'real world' before ordination. I was a member of a small team which went to an experimental boarding school for boys with problems. We
used to go there twice a week—once on a Wednesday evening to get to know the boys, and then on a Sunday morning to take a service.

The school had a mid-term break. There was one boy who had no home to go to, and was stuck at school for the brief holiday. We invited him to come and stay with us at college for a couple of days. As you can imagine, it was not long before he was bored stiff. One of our team knew he had an artistic streak so bought him brushes and paints, and offered him a wall of his room, for a mural.

This fourteen-year-old boy got down to work. He became thoroughly engrossed in the assignment. He spent all day painting, refused all meals, and forbade all entry into the room by curious onlookers. He laboured on throughout the night, and at nine o'clock the following morning, we were invited in for a showing. We were spell¬bound and completely taken aback by what we saw. What he had produced was a magnificent picture of the nativity. It was the work of a genius. He claimed he had no prior knowledge of ever having seen a picture of the nativity.

Where had this artistic 'gift' and inspiration come from? I wonder if this is yet another consequence of 'the divine inbreathing' of the Genesis story of the creation of man. This is what many of the quotations are suggesting. Many of us may have latent artistic gifts in the depths of our being, of which we may not yet be aware.

I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, for work in every craft.
Exodus 31:3-5

He has filled them with ability to do every sort of work done by a craftsman or by a designer or by an embroiderer in blue and purple and scarlet stuff and fine twined linen, or by a weaver—by any sort of workman or skilled designer.
Exodus 35:35

... and there are varieties of working, but it is the same God who inspires them all in every one.
1 Corinthians 12:6

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
Ephesians 2:10

The artist must possess the courageous soul that dares and defies.
Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Other Stories, edited with an Introduction by Lewis Leary, Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1970, page 340

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
Henry Ward Beecher, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, Charles Burnet & Co., 1887, page 223

The artist, of whatever kind, is a man so much aware of the beauty of the universe that he must impart the same beauty to whatever he makes.
A. Clutton Brock, The Ultimate Belief, Constable and Company, 1916, page 101

All true Art is the expression of the soul. The outward forms have value only in so far as they are the expression of the inner spirit of man.
Mohandas K. Gandhi, in C.F. Andrews, Mahatma Gandhi's Ideas, George Allen & Unwin, 1929, page 332

Art is the true and happy science of the soul, exploring nature for spiritual influences, as doth physical science for comforting powers, advancing so to a sure knowledge with life progress.
Robert Bridges, The Testament of Beauty, iii. 1058, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, page 126

A picture, however admirable the painter's art, and wonderful his power, requires of the spectator a surrender of himself, in due proportion with the miracle which has been wrought. Let the canvas glow as it may, you must love with the eye of faith, or its highest excellence escapes you.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1971, page 324

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words. Art thaws even the frozen, darkened soul, opening it to lofty spiritual experience. Through Art we are sometimes sent—indistinctly, briefly—revelations not to be achieved by rational thought.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Word of Truth, The Nobel Speech on Literature, The Bodley Head, 1970, page 5

... our human speech is naught
Our human testimony false, our fame
And human estimation words and wind.
Why take the artistic way to prove so much?
Because, it is the glory and good of Art,
That Art remains the one way possible
Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine at least.
Robert Browning, 'The Ring and the Book', xii. 838, from The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, Smith, Elder & Co.,
1897, volume I

It is important... that great art teaches us how real things can be looked at and loved without being seized and used, without being appropriated into the greedy organism of the self. This exercise of detachment is difficult and valuable whether the thing contemplated is a human being or the root of a tree or the vibration of a colour or a sound. Unsentimental contemplation of nature exhibits the same quality of detach-ment: selfish concerns vanish, nothing exists except the things which are seen.
Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970, page 65

In every human being there is the artist, and whatever his activity, he has an equal chance with any to express the result of his growth and his contact with life. I don't believe any real artist cares whether what he does is 'art' or not. Who, after all, knows what is art?...
I think the real artists are too busy with just being and growing and acting (on canvas or however) like themselves to worry about the end. This end is what it will be. The object is intense living, fufillment, the greatest happiness in creation.
Robert Henri, The Art Spirit, compiled by Margery A. Ryerson, J.P. Lippencott Company, I960, page 226

... the value of art is not merely the value of works of art. It is the value of the aesthetic activity of the spirit, and we must all value that before we can value works of art rightly; and ultimately we must value this glory of the universe, to which we give the name of beauty when we apprehend it. For it is, ultimately, a glory of what is outside us and not merely of our own mental processes...
All the richness and health of our lives depend upon this discovery, this recognition. We live in our relation to the universe, and not merely in our effort to go on living. All this relation of ours is threefold (intellectual, moral and aesthetic) and must be threefold if it is to be right and sane.
A. Clutton Brock, The Ultimate Belief, Constable and Company, 1916, page 76

... the highest beauty of form must be taken from Nature; but it is an art of long deduction and great experience, to know how to find it. We must not content ourselves with merely admiring and relishing; we must enter into the principles on which the work is wrought: these do not swim on the superficies, and consequently are not open to superficial observers.
Art in its perfection is not ostentatious; it lies hid, and works its effect, itself unseen. It is the proper study and labour of an artist to uncover and find out the latent cause of conspicuous beauties, and from thence form principles for his own conduct: such an examination is a continual exertion of the mind; as great, perhaps, as that of the artist whose works he is thus studying.
Sir Joshua Reynolds, 'Sixth Discourse', in Discourses, Seeley & Co., 1905, page 152

Upon the whole it seems to me, that the object and intention of all the Arts is to supply the natural imperfection of things, and often to gratify the mind by realising and embodying what never existed but in the imagination.
It is allowed on all hands, that facts, and events, however they may bind the historian, have no dominion over the poet or the painter. With us, history is made to bend and conform to this great idea of art. And why? Because these arts, in their highest province, are not addressed to the gross senses; but to the desires of the mind, to that spark of divinity which we have within, impatient of being circum¬scribed and pent up by the world which is about us.
Just so much as our art has of this, just so much of dignity, I had almost said of divinity, it exhibits; and those of our artists who possessed this mark of distinction in the highest degree, acquired from thence the glorious appellation of Divine.
Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses, Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1883, page 247

Art is the remembrance of the universal presence of God. Art is Beauty expressed in ways that can be grasped by the senses. It is the form assumed by the Ideal under the laws of the natural world...
Every artist—every artist worthy of the name—helps the human soul to breathe. Art, to a certain extent and at any given moment, is a force which blows the roof off the cave where we crouch imprisoned. What mighty levers does it employ? What massive weights have been placed at its service? Language! Music! A mere breath from human lips!
Poor fugitive notes, poor syllables caught away by the breeze! How invisible your majesty! How weak you seem! Yet you have power to shake the earth to its foundations, and Heaven itself stoops to listen to you. In the solemn moments when we yield ourselves to your sway, our soul breathes a purer air; she breathes, and she is conscious of herself. She says: 'Yes, my God, I am great, and I had forgotten it.'
Ernest Hello, Life, Science, and Art, R. & T. Washbourne, 1913, page 124

There are moments in which it is suddenly brought home to me why creative artists take to drink, become dissipated, lose their way, etc. The artist really needs a very strong character if he is not to go to pieces morally, not to lose his bearings. I don't quite know how to put it properly, but I feel it very strongly in myself at certain moments. All my tenderness, all my emotions, this whole swirling soul-lake, soul-sea,
soul-ocean, or whatever you want to call it, wants to pour out then, to be allowed to flow forth into just one short poem, but I also feel, if only I could, like flinging myself headlong into an abyss, losing myself in drink. After each creative act one has to be sustained by one's strength of character, by a moral sense, by I don't know what, lest one tumble, God knows how far. And pushed by what dark impulse? I sense it inside me; even in my most fruitful and most creative inner moments, there are raging demons and self-destructive forces. Still, I feel that I am learning to control myself, even in those moments. That is when I suddenly have the urge to kneel down in some quiet corner, to rein myself in and to make sure that my energies are not wildly dissipated.
Etty Hillesum, A Diary, 1941-43, translated by Arnold J. Pomerans, Jonathan Cape, 1983, page 76