Art East and West

Art in Asia, Edith Hamilton writes, is based on a fundamental attitude that what the senses sense is not real, is illusory and therefore not worth studying or depicting in art. What alone matters is the imagination unfettered by the restrictions of material reality. Hence Egyptian art is focused on the life hereafter and the Hindu religious images are phantasmagoric.

In the West, the Fort Wayne native, one of the first American women intellectuals, writes, art is "the unifier of what is within and what is without." The artist studies actual representatives of the image he wants to paint, a woman, for example, and first looks for models from which he does "studies" before executing his vision of Woman. His art does not look like any of the women he has studied. She is more beautiful, or more noble, more motherly, more alluring, than the models. This is art in the western sense, according to Hamilton. It is based in the experience of the senses but the information is processed by the mind of the artist. He or she distills from the experience of the many the essence of all of them or those of them that fits the concept he or she wants to embody in art.

Hamilton's book might be dated. Her statements about Greek sculpture suggest she knew the plain, unvarnished marble as how they originally looked. She praises their simple lines, the bareness of vision (similar, by the way, to what Buddhist meditation produces, something else Hamilton was ignorant of), whereas we now believe these statues were slathered in bright, gory paint when they adorned Greek temples and public places. But what she writes holds true for much of what we still hold as true today, eighty years after the book was published. Does this make her statements and our current beliefs true? Not so, but true enough to make us listen and pay attention.

Art is only fable when based solely on imagination. It must either start from a fragment of reality, whether this be an undesired commission from someone wanting to pay us for the work or a glimpse of a vision that enthralls us for no reason, or somehow incorporate into its fabrication something impossible to ignore from our daily experience of life. It must grow organically out of the soil of our material existence. Art must spring as Pallas Athena is said to have done, full-grown from her father's thigh. Art must be coupled with our experience of the material reality on which and maybe from which life of the spirit, of the mind, of the imagination can then fashion something that in turn engages someone else's eye through his or her inner vision. 

To be genuine, art must come from the gutter, as Oscar Wilde said we all lay in: some us though while lying there are looking at the stars.

Posted via email from Duende Arts