A collection of quotations from Robert Henri's book, The Art Spirit, one of Roderick MacIver's favorite books on creativity.All my life I have refused to be for or against parties, for or against nations, for or against people. I never seek novelty or eccentric; I do not go from land to land to contrast civilizations. I seek only, wherever I go, for the symbols of greatness, and as I have already said, they may be found in the eyes of a child, in the movement of a gladiator, in the heart of a gypsy, in twilight in Ireland or in moonrise over the deserts.
Painting is a great mystery. No one has ever learned quite how to paint. No one has ever learned quite how to see....in painting especially, a man should learn to select from all experience, not only from his own but from that of all ages, essential beauty....art is the expression of one's delight in God's work...
There are always a few who get at and feel the undercurrent, and these simply use the surface appearances selecting them and using them as tools to express the undercurrent, the real life.
If I cannot feel an undercurrent then I see only a series of things. They may be attractive and novel at first but soon grow tiresome.To be free, to be happy and fruitful, can only be attained through sacrifice of many common but overestimated things.
Do not let the fact that things are not made for you, that conditions are not as they should be, stop you. Go on anyway. Everything depends on those who go on anyway.
Children are greater than the grown man. All grown men have more experience, but only a very few retain the greatness that was theirs before the system of compromises began in their lives.
Art is simply a result of expression during right feeling. It's a result of a grip on the fundamentals of nature, the spirit of life, the constructive force, the secret of growth, a real understanding of the relative importance of things, order, balance. Any material will do. After all, the object is not to make art, but to be in the wonderful state which makes art inevitable.
I think the real artists are too busy with just being and growing and acting (on canvass or however) like themselves to worry about the end. The end will be what it will be. The object is intense living, fulfillment; the great happiness in creation.
The big painter is one who has something to say. He thus does not paint men, landscape or furniture, but an idea.
A work of art is the trace of a magnificent struggle.
It's hard. I shiver with the cold. It is easy maybe to sit here and write this, seated by a steam radiator. But I know what it is to be cold and alone in both ways. I have lived, a little younger than you, where there was equal cold and more exposure. I have known ever since what it is to be cold and alone, and sometimes desperately so, because I have believed what I believe and have stood by my believing.
You go on. The country is full of men who are working in the cold, or worse--too much heat--just to get enough to purchase a day's miserable existence. You are working for your character, and your pay is to last you all your life.
I write so much because I admire you for the stand you have taken and I want to shout with joy because a man has taken the bit in his teeth.
If you paint two or three hundred canvases this winter and a dozen of them are really good and say your say of yourself, time and place, you can be happy. Beauty is no material thing.
Beauty cannot be copied. Beauty is the sensation of pleasure on the mind of the seer. No thing is beautiful. But all things await the sensitive and imaginative mind that may be aroused to pleasurable emotion at sight of them. This is beauty. Everything that is beautiful is orderly, and there can be no order unless things are in their right relation to each other. Of this right relation throughout the world beauty is born. An artist who does not use his imagination is a mechanic.
The big painter is one who has something to say. He thus does not paint men, landscape or furniture, but an idea.
This is my journal.. a private place, made public, for those interested in how a painting gets from HERE to THERE: scraps of paper torn from magazines, smeared with paint, notes for an essay, songs that are the soundtrack for the series, to do lists, the studio.... floor to ceiling with canvases, the lights rising up on the hills from the window, my view...and occasionally, a painting I am happy with.
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barns in the middayu sun sold
late for the party 64x30 oil
![[image]](http://www.mnh.si.edu/africanvoices/images/gallery/manifestations/photo_01.jpg)
day 3 finished beavch painting 24 x 24 oil
erosion
