Tuesday, September 25, 2018

D.H. Lawrence on art theory


  I am still not able to get the advertising off of my art blog, so I am going to post some of my art here from time to time.   I may tackle that problem one day when my enthusiasm can be channeled in that direction.  I am open to suggestions. 

  For the moment, however,  I am baffled as to where to start and so many more appealing pastimes are taking my attention, like how to make a mask out of paper mâché. 


Detail from collage by Mary M Payne

Yes, that is part of my new assignment but before I tackle that, I thought I'd put up this quote from D.H. Lawrence sent by a friend of ours.   Thanks Charlie, I sympathize with Lawrence, 


 "Ours is an excessively conscious age.  We know so much, we feel so little.  I have lived enough around painters and around studios to have had all the theories – and how contradictory they are – rammed down my throat.  A man has to have a gizzard like an ostrich to digest all the brass tacks and wire nails of modern art theories. 

 Perhaps all the theories, the utterly indigestible theories, like nails in an ostrich’s gizzard, do indeed help to grind small and make digestible all the emotional and aesthetic pabulum that lies in an artist’s soul.  But they can serve no other purpose.  Not even corrective. 


 The modern theories of art make real pictures impossible.  You only get these expositions, critical ventures in paint, and fantastic negations.  And the bit of fantasy that may lie in the negation – as in a Dufy or a de Chirico – is just the bit that has escaped theory and perhaps saves the picture.  Theorise, theorise all you like – but when you start to paint, shut your theoretic eyes and go for it with instinct and intuition."

D.H. Lawrence:  Making Pictures in The Creative Process, edited by Brewster Ghiselin

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