These words by the great Pre-Raphaelite painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones have always been 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 ,indeed it is for many including myself, and I hope it can be for many more in time. It is with contempt then that we survey the unutterable drivel and rubbish that is so often 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 queued up for the shows of Titian, Caravaggio or Velasquez in London, for example, will vouch for that. But the public, as Wilde once said, has been badly brought up, and has been hoodwinked by the modernist sympathisers in the media into believing that art of comparable quality or intention is not possible nowadays. This is clearly a falsehood, but it is one necessary to the survival of modernism, the only way a dripping tap or flashing light can be marketed as art is if all previous ideas of art are not just redifined but completely rejected. If skill, talent and sincerity are admitted to be necessary for the production of art then the whole modernist house collapses into its sandy foundations. But the tragic part is that skill and talent amongst artists of the past were only a means to an end; the great artists of previous centuries were concerned with the real issues of our human existance; life and death, beginnings and endings, love and compassion, beauty and the reverence of beauty but today with the worship of the slovenly and superficial even these fundamental values are regarded as at best, embarrasing, and at worst completely inadmissable.
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, and it is artists who must lead the fight. For too long art has been controlled by writers and critics with artists working merely in order to support one particular line of criticism or another. But an artist's role isn't to provide ammuntion for critics. 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.
