It has been the office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty but our eyes have no clear vision.
Interpretation
Art helps us to appreciate and understand beauty in the world around us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes the vital role of art in shaping our ability to perceive beauty. While beauty surrounds us, our natural perception may be clouded or unclear, and it is through art that we can refine our vision and appreciation for what is beautiful in life.
In practice
During a gallery opening, I shared Emerson's quote to emphasize the transformative power of art.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
As an artist I have always tried to be faithful to my vision of life, and I have frequently been in conflict with those who wanted me to paint not what I saw but what they wished me to see.
The music began, and it was one of those life-changing moments. I saw an artist, Janis Joplin. She was exhilarating. She was vibrating. And she was like no other artist that I had ever seen before... It struck me that hard. Maybe the word is epiphany, when you get that special sensation.
The vampires have always been metaphors for me. They've always been vehicles through which I can express things I have felt very, very deeply.
...What is the use of beauty? i have lived my life surrounded by painters, and still I do not know the answer. But i suspect, some days, that beauty helps protect the spirit of mankind, swaddle it and succor it, so that we might survive. Beauty is no end in itself, but if it makes or lives less miserable so that we might be more kind-well, then, lets have beauty, painted on our porcelain, hanging on our walls, ringing through our stories.
Any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on - including your own incompetence.
You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits.
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