My Arnold

I bought a bird feeder a few weeks ago and the word has finally gotten around the neighborhood that there is food on Hazel's porch! So far I have accumulated: two couples of Mr. and Mrs. House Finches, one Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal, one Mr. and Mrs. Gray Catbird, one Chickadee, one Tufted Titmouse, one Mourning Dove, and one Tree Sparrow!

But that's not all! What has been even more fun to watch are the two squirrels who have been frequenting my porch. One is really, really fat and scared/neurotic, but the other is the cutest, sweetest little button! I named him Arnold and he loves me because I put bowls of seed out for him. He is the only one of all of the animals that have been visiting me that won't run away when I come close. I suppose he's the only one that realizes that I'm where his goodies come from. We've bonded...

Getting to watch the squirrels and birds has helped me come to realize just how much I love nature. It's where I find the most peace. It's an escape from this world; it's a little glimpse of Home that arouses all the senses. I find my inspiration in the vast, matchless beauty and splendor of the earth and all that lives on it. What better thing to strive to capture in a work of art than the incomprehensible wonders of Creation? It is the Divine Masterpiece. What better beauty and perfection to study, to aim for, to dwell on than life? For it has been said to, "ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds of the air, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish of the sea inform you. Which of all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this? In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind" (Job 12:7-10). Learn from the Master - the supreme, original Artist.

"If art is good art, if it is true art, if it is beautiful art, then it is bearing witness to the Author of the good, the true, and the beautiful." - R.C. Sproul, Lifeviews

...fat squirrel name ideas anyone? :-)

The Art of Looking Sideways

I've been at work for over an hour now and, so far, there have been no customers, so I've been reading a really neat book called, The Art of Looking Sideways, and I just want to share a couple of quotes I came across that I thought were really pertinent to this class... Do you find any of these particularly interesting?

on seeing,
"The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes." Goethe

on illusion,
"Who are you going to believe, me or your eyes?" Groucho Marx

on figuring,
"...my name means the shape I am - and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost." Humpty Dumpty

on imaging,
"Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees." Paul Valery

Learning to See

I’m not very good at retaining knowledge, so I always get kind of childishly excited when I encounter something/anything in my day that I can link to something I’ve learned at school. I get so proud of myself when I hear a big word and know what it means, or hear a quote and know who it’s by, or definitely when my Mom showed me the latest Coldplay CD (her new obsession) and I was able to tell her (thanks to Gantt!) that the painting on the album cover was Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix! I love taking studio classes because I can relate pretty much everything I see to them in some way. I’ve really been enjoying taking only art classes this semester because I can just stay in the visual-thinking mode all of the time. (I cannot do two modes at once.) Since I spend all of my day thinking – visually, it’s kind of been like anywhere I am I have a book to read! This has made a big difference in pretty much every other area of my life as well because I look at everything differently. Sometimes it seems like everything I see I imagine on a canvas, or in a sketchbook, or as a photograph. I notice things everyday that I’ve learned from each of my classes. I catch myself analyzing color combinations and proportions, advertisement layouts, fonts, and patterns, but what has really been the most interesting is how I’ve learned to look at and analyze shapes as being made up of lines. Seeing the lines and directions of the lines that make up a subject has really helped my brain to understand a three-dimensional object as two-dimensional. I am very glad that I am learning to live visually. It makes the world a much more beautiful place when you try to see the art in every part of it.

 

Louis Pasteur (a French scientist) said, “In the field of observation, chance favors only the mind that is prepared.”

 

The experiences of everyday life provide us with a constant stream of interesting stimuli, yet most people are not prepared to appreciate the fascinating details that are right before their eyes. I am learning.

The Mind's Eye

"When your eyes are open you see beauty in anything." - painter Agnes Martin

I really like to read, but for the last two years or so a significant amount of my time has either been spent in class, on homework, at work, or asleep. As a result of this, I have developed a bad habit of starting a different book every time I have time to pick one up. I do like variety, but I hate overlapping things and I really hate not finishing things (at least, things that I like). I’m the same way with food. I don’t like having little bites of everything on my plate; I eat one thing and move onto the next only after the other is gone.

Anyway, one of the books that I have started relates directly to the foundational theme of this class: looking. The book is called “How to Look at Everything” and it is by the photographer/painter/sculptor, David Finn. Don’t let the elementary title and cover fool you; there is some good stuff inside! I am going to share a lot of excerpts because I found so many valuable thoughts and ideas and ways of illustrating things that pertain to exactly what we’re doing, and these are all ones I couldn’t bring myself to weed out…and these are only from the first chapter. It’s basically just a good book and you should go buy it or, at least, check it out of the library.

Quotes/excepts from Chapter One: The Mind’s Eye

“The mind's eye incorporates what we know with what we see. Since each of us has a unique conglomeration of facts, memories, associations, and speculations in our heads, what one mind's eye sees at any moment is very different from what another mind's eye sees. Artists, writers, and personal friends can open our eyes to what they see and thereby enlarge our vision, but ultimately the images that form in our brains are our own.”

“One of the secrets of the art of looking is the ability to focus on details. That is not very different from shopping in a store where your eye picks out from a multitude of objects those that happen to interest you. The trick is to know what you are looking for. In a supermarket, you may be trying to find a particular brand, or size of container, or item on sale; if you are a practiced shopper you will know how to find what you seek. You also may be able to pick out a sought-after book in a wall of bookshelves because you remember something about the jacket.”

“By looking carefully at things that excite us we can train our eyes to see what others may not notice.”

“What is it that goes on in our brains that transforms commonplace sights into images that can have this kind of effect? Perhaps some neurological discovery will be made one day that will explain how it happens. People who know how to meditate deeply have described the sense of awareness of the outer world and the feeling of oneness with the universe that accompanies the state of ecstasy they achieve. Others have testified to the sharpness of vision that is induced by certain drugs. But great artists may have developed their own sight-enhancing practices. They know how to trigger the nerve-endings in their brain that make seeing more than just looking. The artist Henri Matisse used to tell his students that the inner feeling they had when looking at something was more important than what they saw literally with their eyes. What was important was to "render the emotion" awakened within them. He urged them to close their eyes and hold the vision, and they would see the object better than with their eyes open. In his essay "Exactitude is not the Truth," Matisse wrote that conviction does not depend on "the exact copying of natural forms . . . but on the profound feeling of the artist before the objects that he has chosen, on which his attention is focused and the spirit of which he has penetrated."

“So how does one look at everything through the mind's eye? This book will attempt to give some guidance; but the shorthand answer is with passion. One can be passionate about anything one sees--anything and everything. All it takes is the willingness to open your eyes and your heart, and let feelings grow strong within you.”

“The mind's eye is magical. Through it we can see loved ones who are no longer here, by looking at objects they owned that were precious to them. We can create works of art in our heads out of a special vision that we can nurture within us. One way that we can nurture this vision is by looking at art created by masters. These masterpieces can teach us how to transform what we look at with our naked eye, or what we imagine in our mind's eye. All we need is the will to do so.”