a trace
It was primarily through the idealized, soft-focus images of the Pictorialists that the nude became a generally accepted photographic subject. Photographers like Robert Demachy, Frank Eugene, and Clarence White looked for new inspiration in painting, and adopted techniques like the delicate platinum print or the vigorous gum bichromate print to lend their works the richness of older art media.-Encyclpedia of Photography Rosenblum.
The object, which is back of every true work of art, is the attainment of a state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence. In such moments activity is inevitable, and whether this activity is with brush, pen, chisel, or tongue, its result is but a by-product of the state, a trace, the footprint of the state. -Robert Henri the art spirit
In His Art Spirit Robert Henri speaks of an intese emotional state the artist enters, what Berensen called a 'fascination of an ever-heightened reality;' Henri was [] His stlyle 'Hal's-Velasquez-Manet tradion of realism lends itself to an emotional catharsis not dissimilar religious ecstacy. Henri is remembered as much for his educational approach championing freedom of expression as the externalized equivelent of the various colors of the soul, as for his painting. He remains influental today. It was in fact something of a recovery of an artistic inheritance from Giotto to Raphael over against mere academic and empty artistic exercises of copying objective verities..
One writer succinctly summarizes the revolutionary spirit that animated the turn of the 20th century and as pinnacled in 'The Eight' as 'a slashing brush stroke and lust for life.' In spontanious expression subject matter went far beyond the four walls of academic tradition. Of course all this was ill recieved by the artistic establishment of the time, earning Henri and his followers the epitath of the 'Ashcan School.'
Henri battled a 19th century concrete and souless materialism. Art was for him the recovery and salvation of the soul. It was the inevitable result of living a life. It was spirit. If we realized such a state every act would be full of grace and poise, every thought poetic, everything music. All life would be filled with such color.
Despite our protestations to the contrary, we still are more often than not concrete materialists. Never mind Einstein and his Physics. Oh yeah, we believe in spirits, the afterlife, hauntings ghosts and demons, maybe even the divine and heaven, but never anything we might really encounter in the flesh, the actual the real. The day to day. The here and now.
The power of the soul.
This week I was scannng some of my work from this summer to update my. website since I changed hosts. And I came across this recent image of a muse.
The image more a candid shot between two expressive pieces shows the model rapt in her activty. This is what modeling really is Modeling is not a skeletal rack to hang clothes on, but the expresson and engagement of the soul itself. Modeling is an art in front of the camera equal the activity behind. Thank you Rose.
-Image from my figure portfolio
It
is in living and acting that man establishes his relationship with
being, with the truth and with the good. The artist has a special
relationship to beauty. In a very true sense it can be said that beauty
is the vocation bestowed on him by the Creator in the gift of “artistic
talent”. Letter to Artists Pope John Paul II
According his several dispositions the viewer likewise enters the selfsame trace.
The rediscovery-of-the magic of
the world under the debris of modem ideas. -saul
bellow