Favorite Quotes

I love to paint the human form both clothed and not. The body is a landscape which is ever shifting and changing, undulating and pulsing. The subtle shifts of warm to cool  and of values requires the deepest discernment of seeing and thus honesty. No cliches, gimmicks or stereotypes can be employed if the soul through the art is to be revealed. It is my aspiration to paint that way some day. Here are quotes which inspire, humble and direct my course.

For soule is forme, and doth the bodie make.

                        - Spenser, Hymne in Honour of Beautie, 1596

THE NAKED AND THE NUDE

                By Robert Graves (b. 1895)

For me, the naked and the nude

(By lexicographers construed

As synonyms that should express

The same deficiency of dress

Or shelter) stand as wide apart

As love from lies, or truth from art.

Lovers without reproach will gaze

On bodies naked and ablaze;

The Hippocratic eye will see

In nakedness, anatomy;

And naked shines the Goddess when

She mounts her lion among men.

The nude are bold, the nude are sly

To hold each treasonable eye.

While draping by a showman’s trick

Their dishabille in rhetoric,

They grin a mock- religious grin

Of scorn at those of naked skin.

The naked, therefore, who compete

Against the nude may know defeat;

Yet when they both together tread

The briary pastures of the dead,

By Gorgons with long whips pursued,

How naked go the sometime nude!

Connotations

Denotations

“The ambiguity and multiplicity of meanings possessed by words (images) are an obstacle to the scientist but a resource to the poet (artist).  Laurence Perrine Sound and Sense

Picasso has often exempted the (nude) from the savage metamorphosis which he has inflicted on the visible world ..´

Kenneth Clark  The Nude pg 4

“What is the nude?” It is an art form invented by the Greeks in the 5^th century. The nude is not the subject of art, but a form of art. ( 5)

“By long habit we do not judge it as a living organism, but as a design: (pg 7)

Du Fresnoy (Mason’s translation)

        For tho’ our casual glance may sometimes meet

With charms that strike thee soul and seem complete.

Yet if those charms too closely we define,

Content to copy nature line for line,

Our end is lost. Not such the master’s care,

Curious he culls the perfect from the fair;

 Judge of his art, thro’ beauty’s realm he flies,

Selects, combines, improves, diversifies;

With nimble step pursues the fleeting throng,

And clasps each Venus as she glides along.

Durer

There lives no man upon earth who can give a final judgment upon what the most beautiful shape of a man may be; God only knows that….

Dipendenza: Michelangelo – His sense of the relationship between the two forms of order -  ideal scheme and functional necessities (architect and draftsman of nude)

Until the beginning of the 20^th century art was used to glorify God.