These words by the great Pre-Raphaeilite painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones have always beens my guide and inspiration. We live in a secular age which has largely lost its faith yet still feels the need for a pathway to the sublime. Art can be such a pathway, is for many including myself, and I hope can be for many more in time. It is with contempt then that we survey the unutterable drivel and rubbish that has been foisted upon us in the name of art by galleries, dealers critics and other paid supporters of the modernist movement. It is time for all those who love real art and particularly those who create, it to stand together and unite to overthrow the scribes and pharisees of modernism.
There is no doubt that there is an appetite amongst the general public for art of the highest quality, anybody who has queued up for the recent shows of Titian, Caravaggio or Velasquez in London will vouch for that. But the public, as Wilde once said, has been badly brought up, and have been hoodwinked by the modernist sympathisers in the media into believing that art of comparable quality or intention is not possible nowadays. Well, of course this is nonsense, it is possible and perhaps more necessary than at any previous time in history. The great artists of the past were concerned with the real issues of our human existance, life and death, beginnings and endings, love and hate and all conveyed by means of solid draftsmanship and good technique. Note though, that this was always used as a means to an end, the really great artists, Titain, Velasquez and Rembrandt are the most obvious examples, always found the technique necessary to help them say what they wanted to say, it was the means only, not the end in itself.
Nowadays the aspiring artist, if he wants to get on, is taught to loathe technique but also taught to loathe the things it used to express, beauty, compassion, love and above all sincerity and depth of emotion. We live, sadly, in a superficial age; an age of corporate planning, branding, spin and PR, so perhaps it is not surprising that the dominant note of most modern art is superficiality, and often openly and avowedly so.
But some artists are fighting back, some are even quite successful in a way, especially it seems in the U.S. though even there many seem to feel it is safer to avoid any great emotional depth. But art has a sacred duty, it is the one sphere of human activity that can give us beauty, beauty is its special province and without it, it is nothing. Walter Pater once wrote "We have an interval and then we cease to be. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passion, the wisest in art and song. For our one chance is in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time.... of this wisdom the poetic passion, the desire for beauty, the love of art for art's sake has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments sake."
So it is an important task that we artists set ourselves, this increasing the value of life for our audience and of course ourselves. I don't pretend for a moment to be satisified with what I have produced so far, no artist ever is, but I hope there is something here that will increase the quality of your moments. If not then come back soon; this is a work in progress, and in the meantime go to the links pages and have a look at some artists, living and dead, who are further along the road.
