Every Act Is A Visual

It Would Be Most Wholesome If For At Least Twenty Years Art Historians Were Forbidden To Refer To Any Derivations. If They Were Not Allowed To Account For A Work Of Art Mainly By Tracing Where It Comes From, They Would Have To Deal With It In And By Itself--which Is What They Are Most Needed For.

No Longer Can We Consider What The Artist Does To Be A Self-contained Activity, Mysteriously Inspired From Above, Unrelated And Unrelatable To Other Human Activities. Instead, We Recognize The Exalted Kind Of Seeing That Leads To The Creation Of Great Art As An Outgrowth Of The Humbler And More Common Activity Of The Eyes In Everyday Life. Just As The Prosaic Search For Information Is "artistic" Because It Involves Giving And Finding Shape And Meaning, So The Artist's Conceiving Is An Instrument Of Life, A Refined Way Of Understanding Who And Where We Are.

From Building A Fire One Can Learn Something About Artistic Composition. If You Use Only Small Kindling And Large Logs, The Fire Will Quickly Eat Up The Small Pieces But Will Not Become Strong Enough To Attack The Large Ones. You Must Supply A Scale Of Sizes From The Smallest To The Largest. The Human Eye Also Will Not Make Its Way Into A Painting Or Building Unless A Continuum Of Shapes Leads From The Small To The Large, From The Large To The Small.

As One Gets Older, It Happens That In The Morning One Fails To Remember The Airplane Trip To Be Taken In A Few Hours Or The Lecture Scheduled For The Afternoon.

Modem Science, Then, Maintains On The One Hand That Nature, Both Organic And Inorganic, Strives Towards A State Of Order And That Man's Actions Are Governed By The Same Tendency.