Slightest Things Tell of Afterwards by Paul A. L. Hall [paulhallart] The artist can see beyond if he or she gets past all the barriers such as conceit, representationalism, realism, and other such money-making cop-outs. One look alone is worth the thrill instead of the tedious acquisition of all the tricks and prestidigitation of the realistic painter. I mean, people have forgotten that. It took centuries to get that far and it all got thrown away by a nation of cheap millionaires and peasants. They want a landscape that looks like the real thing. Well it isnt. Its nothing but paint playing tricks with your eyes. Now the real artist, rare as they may be, though more common than one might think; plentiful enough to be of service to everyone, reaches with great effort into the unknown and brings back a prize to share with us all, something to pull us out of our complacency and bring us into the proper stature of a full civilization. All the artist really needs is subsidy. The real ones anyway. Wealth is not money. Wealth is art. Money is a mere illusion. It could be worthless tomorrow. But art contributes to its owners capacity to become visionary to at least a practical extent, if not better. Its the real value. It causes the mind of the beholder to latch on to something greater; to the real beauty of the cosmos. But you forgot about that. You imagined they were all hustlers throwing paint on the canvass for a million dollars a pop. The real hustler is someone who does nothing more than, for his or her entire usurping career, paint, draw or sculpt things than mimic reality. I do that for exercise, to paint a landscape or draw a figure, but then something more goes into the composition, something seen beyond the reality. To my observation, it appears to me that art is dying. I look in the magazines and at examples of contemporary art and I see too much of this drivel turned out by troops of conformists dressed in their black Halloween costumes, trying to look mean like nobles of some star wars empire, cranking out their uninspired masterpieces realistic to the minutest detail. But its you neauveau riche that encourage them. It reminds me of a lady at a house where I was house-sitting a while ago who paid quite a bit for a painting of a couple of flamingo. It wasnt the actual painting but a large mass-produced poster-sized print. It was split in half with a thin silver aluminum excuse for a frame and each covered with a sheet of glass. When I offered to go out and do a few landscapes in oil for them, she looked at me with contempt and said triumphantly, Im the art expert around here. We dont want your paintings, we want real art. Besides, why should we have paintings of scenes from around here. What we need are scenes on our walls from exotic places. Theyre so afraid of being cheated they pay a fortune for stuff that only looks like their idea of what reality should be like. It caters to their egos never lifts them up. So the real artists that are coming up with something lasting, solid, uplifting, are lost in the shuffle. We never hear of them after they get buried in the oblivion of the shallow uninspired artisans patronized by the self-proclaimed art experts who really know nothing about great art. If thats you, then I pity you, but Im not too worried about it. As I told my mother once, my eyes are in my head. I can make pictures of what I see, but if people are too greedy to be concerned about art thats their loss. Their little world would end, they would pass on into oblivion, dollar signs on their eyes, never seeing farther than their noses. Look at the limitations of literature, consisting mainly of how-to books in an ancient Roman alphabet, so limited in capabilities. The soma, the drug is in some satisfaction of a job well done. Its a delusion, sitting there with your retarded alphabet and limited syntax writing in a dying language using the tools of a dead one. There is so much more than the mere lettering we use in English today could do for us, but no one steps out. There is no effort. But its not in the riot, its in the quiet. The formative. The slow forming an knitting together of the filaments of the cosmos within our minds, the slow coming together of the potential of greatness in each of us to be able to reach out. To step out of confinement to escape the prison. The slow quiet of the formation in an artists mind driving him or her to produce a scene or an object of art that will bring others to higher ground. Not superior to the reality around us, but part of it, bring out of the soil at our roots our own special flowers, like none ever seen before.
Posted on: Sun, 09 Mar 2014 01:52:58 +0000
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