The Arts & You: From Painting to Literature, What the Arts Can Do for You

By H. Charles Romesburg

The Arts & You has more than a thousand quotations of artists and art critics, compiled from journal articles and books of the last two hundred years, on painting, sculpture, photography, garden arts, architecture, poetry, music, dance, theater, and literature.

They are a treasure for learning the power of the arts to:

• Language: English
• Publisher: H. Charles Romesburg
• Release date: Dec 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9781735747910

H. Charles Romesburg

H. Charles Romesburg is a professor at Utah State University. He is widely cited for his research and is author of four books. He has received the Teacher of the Year in his college. His blog is The Saunterer, at www.comesaunter.com He donates all proceeds from his books to art museums and no-kill humane societies.

Book preview

The Arts & You:

From Painting to Literature, What the Arts Can Do for You

Copyright © 2020 - H. Charles Romesburg

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

For information on this book, please contact the author and publisher. Charles Romesburg, Logan, Utah

[e-mail]

All images are either listed as FAIR USE or purchased from Adobe Stock Royalty Free Images. Please see the Endnotes for additional citation information.

ISBN: 978-1-7357479-0-3 (Trade Paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-7357479-1-0 (ePub)

First Printing, 2020

Printed in the United States of America

Cover Design and Interior Formatting by

Becky's Graphic Design, LLC, Mt. Juliet, Tennessee

In memory of the Stanley W. Calkins family

Prologue

Unlike science, which is mainly about knowing, the arts are mainly about feeling. " The Arts & You" covers the different arts – painting, sculpture, poetry, music, dance, literature, and so forth – showing you how they go, why we need them, and how partaking of them throughout your life can bring you thousands of shades of emotion and a deeper understanding and appreciation of life.

Nearly all of the book consists of short passages by art experts, which I collected from academic journals and books (many dating into the 1800s) in the library stacks and archives of Utah State University. The rest are my annotations.

Now and then, to illustrate a passage I will ask you to use the internet, i.e., saying Search for images of van Gogh paintings or Search for videos of Martha Graham dancing.

As a micro-philanthropist, I support the arts. All sales proceeds from "The Arts & You" will go to art museums and no-kill humane societies.

And with your increased understanding of the arts will come a greater awareness of what the arts can do for you.

H. Charles Romesburg,

Logan, Utah, January 2021

Contents

Prologue

Introduction

Painting

Beauty

Sculpture

Photography

Art Gardens

Architecture

Poetry

Music

Dance

Theater

Literature

Art Museums

Education & Advice

Endnotes

Introduction

The arts are not a frill, and the three passages below will get you on your way to understanding why. To begin with, have you ever wondered why people living long ago decorated their pottery? Willa Cather knew. She wrote:

…

Hundreds of years ago, before European civilization had touched this continent, the Indian women in the old rock-perched pueblos of the Southwest were painting geometrical patterns on the jars in which they carried water up from the streams. Why did they take the trouble? These people lived under the perpetual threat of drought and famine; they often shaped their graceful cooking pots when they had nothing to cook in them. Anyone who looks over a collection of pre-historic Indian pottery dug up from old burial mounds knows at once that the potters experimented with form and color to gratify something that had no concern with food and shelter. The major arts have a pedigree all their own. They did not come into being as a means of increasing the game supply or promoting tribal security. They sprang from an unaccountable predilection of the one unaccountable thing in man.

Second, do you know which is a better guidepost for keeping your personal relationships strong – science or art? Hear E. M. Forster responding to someone:

I am a little doubtful perhaps about your application of ‘psychology’ to your difficulties, though your psychology is of course better than other people’s. Science, when applied to personal relationships, is always just wrong – I refrain from adding in booming tones, ‘and always will be’, but it is certainly always just wrong at present. Art is a better guide than Science.

…

Third, why has no one ever cried from reading a biology or chemistry or economics book, while millions have from watching Walt Disney’s movie Bambi or reading a touching poem? The arts produce emotions, feelings in us that science cannot.

What you will learn from reading and reflecting on the passages by art experts in the following chapters will improve your understanding of the arts. Some passages are almost the same, good for fixing the ideas. Others are sufficiently different, good for progressing to new ideas. And with your increased understanding of the arts will come a greater awareness of what the arts can do for you.

Painting

The quoted passages in this chapter are true of paintings and all forms of pictorial art, such as drawing, print making, etchings, stencil art, decorated pottery and the like. Read each slowly, then pause and reflect on what it means.

­…

The work of art consists of two elements: the inner and the outer. The inner element, taken by itself, is the emotion in the soul of the artist. This emotion is capable of calling forth what is, essentially, a corresponding emotion in the soul of the observer. As long as the soul is joined to the body, it can as a rule only receive vibrations via the medium of the feelings. Feelings are therefore a bridge from the non-material to the material (in the case of the artist) and from the material to the non-material (in the case of the observer).

Emotion – feelings – the work of art – feelings – emotion.

– Wassily Kandinsky

Whereas thoughts can only be transferred to minds sufficiently prepared to received them, the feelings that are the birthright of our common humanity are shared by all normal people. When an orator fails to sway his audience, we say the orator has failed – not the audience. But when a boy fails to understand the 5th proposition because he has not understood those that preceded it, we do not say that Euclid has failed – but that the boy has not understood him. Science is a human activity, transmitting thoughts from man to man; Art is a human activity, transmitting feelings.

– Aylmer Maude

Art is concerned with the expression of feeling. It is not so much what we know but how we feel about what we know that determines what we do.

– Lillian Baldwin

Art began when man put two stones together and found pleasure in there being one against the other.

Art is a source for the betterment of human experience. Art serves as a tool for the concrete articulation of the spirit and is therefore an effective agent in the morality of human experience.

Composition is important because a creative work is a vehicle for feelings.

– F. G. Asenjo

Imagination is the very soul of all development, the prefiguring of the possible, the inspiration to do so. Fiction is a product of the imagination. Art must have beauty – the beauty of order, of discipline, of temperament, of imagination, of mystery – all of these which are greater than exact facts, or details, which express the soul of things rather than the concrete image. What is it that you feel when you stand before the couchant Sphinx out there by the Pyramids? It is not age alone: it is power; it is art; it is soul.

– Gilbert Parker

Art is power. It influences the mind, the nerves, the feelings, the soul. It carries messages of hope, hostility, derision, and moral rebuke. It can fight moral and spiritual evils, and can transmit the ideas of a community now living, long past, or soon to be born. In a word, Art is deemed to be universally important because it helps men to live and to remember.

The experience of great art leaves one changed in ways that only gradually come to light.

– Jacques Barzun

Art is a lie that makes us see the truth.

I too often tell myself: ‘It’s not quite there yet. You can do better.’ I can rarely keep myself from redoing a thing – umpteen times the same thing. Sometimes it gets to be a real obsession. After all, why work otherwise, if not to better express the same thing? You must always seek perfection.

When you begin a picture, you often make some pretty discoveries. You must be on guard against these. Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather transforms it, condenses it, makes it more substantial. What comes out in the end is the result of discarded finds. Otherwise, you become your own connoisseur. I sell myself nothing.

– Pablo Picasso

There must be something peculiar about a work of art of which the world feels after hundreds of years it has not yet had enough.

That a substance called thought, freighted with experience, can flow from the universal into a brain and out again in the shape of an art form to find lodgment in another brain a century after the creating brain is dust – if there is anything more wonderful than this, I do not know what it is.

Repeated visits to a museum are like re-readings of a great book. The first time through one finds where the notable spots are. After that, go through it as often as you will, there is always something new. Nourishment is in these works of art. So, too, with color. Most of us are insensitive to it. These galleries teach our eyes to see it. And words can no more describe such color harmony than they can reproduce orchestral harmony.

– LuciEn Price

The discoveries of medical science will increase your lifespan, but looking at certain paintings will do it far more and faster. After you read the next three entries, I will tell you how.

…

Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.

– Will and Ariel Durant

I never grow weary of the significance of little things. What do the so-called great things of life count for in the end, the fashion of man’s showing-off for the benefit of his fellows? It is the little things that give its savour or its bitterness to life, the little things that direct the current of activity, the little things that alone really reveal the intimate depths of personality.

– Havelock Ellis

…We’re made so that we love

First when we see them painted, things we have passed

Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;

And so they are better, painted – better to us,

Which is the same thing.

Art was given for that.

– Robert Browning

Together, the above three entries explain a wonderful function of art. To begin with, how much of your past do you immediately remember? Very little. That’s because you lived it out in your personal stream, and all the while the unconscious part of your mind saw and stored the little things happening on the bank that matter. Seeing certain paintings opens your subconscious mind, bringing the little things into conscious awareness and appreciation.

Some of my examples:

The Veteran in a New Field, 1865

by Winslow Homer (1836-1910)¹

One look at Winslow Homer’s painting, A Veteran in a New Field, of a soldier returned home after the Civil War, cutting grain with a scythe – one look and I’m nine years old again, reliving a day 73 years ago, my grandfather showing me how to swing a scythe, clearing the overgrown lot next door.

Andrew Wyeth’s Point of View immediately recalls summer nights of years ago in Pennsylvania on my bed in the sun porch watching the curtains pushed into the room by an approaching storm – and I feel now as I felt then.

The Big Dory, 1913

by George Bellows (1882-1925)²

George Bellow’s The Big Dory 1913 takes me back to times when I with friends dragged our loaded canoes over a lake beach in Canada, and the memory of that expands to the memory of the whole trip.

A painting of a shoeshine man, and suddenly I am ten, sitting high on the chair at the shoeshine stand, my grandmother watching. I feel the man’s rag whipping back and forth. I feel the difficulty of trying to hold my foot still. It is my Saturday noon ritual, and after it lunch at Hagan’s ice cream store and to see a double feature at the Penn Theater and learn how the hero in the serial, last Saturday ten feet from being swept over Niagara Falls, escapes.

If we had no memories, we would not recognize time. Paintings (as well as other kinds of art) can create time by unlocking subconscious memories of little things on