What is Correspondence

I was in correspondence with a good friend and fellow artist today, someone who's perceptive mind and ideas have always had a telling impact on helping me understand my own labyrinthine connection to what it is to be an artist. His statement "art is life for me- life is art" is so deceptively simple that it takes a minute to realize actually how profound that statement is. What is art if it is not the actual visceral core of one person's experience brought to a point of beauty and as a transmissible object of contemplation. Put all the crap aside- it is what is left over after the hype, efforts to achieve novel or noticeable effects, visibility via celebrity, and chasing the carrot of the latest novelty whether it is painting, conceptual art or photography. The moment of conviction- the point at which something fundamentally human is expressed is the moment when beauty (or call it magic, or mystery) is brought to life. And this is the depth of feeling one person has for and in, life. That is why some things register as art, and some things as novelty. Why some things fly and others only walk or remain stationary. Skill is that of the mind and not the hand, and it is the unwavering connection with that which is true and significant that makes art. The statement by Wilde "art is what is left over after everything else has fallen away" makes better sense if one considers what the left over bits refer to.

Teachers lead by example, but the learning is knowledge we build together.

Newfoundland Suite- Yellow Box Gallery

Sept. 6- mid Oct. 2013 at the Yellow Box Gallery, Saint Thomas University, Fredericton. A group of oil sketches from a series made in 2012 in southwestern Newfoundland. Curated by William Forrestall with text by Virgil Hammock.

Stephen Scott, as you can see from the paintings on the wall, has both a fine eye and hand. These small paintings speak elegantly to the long tradition of landscape painting. He is a plein-airist which simply means that he often paints directly from nature and that gives value to the immediacy of his art. Stephen is also an unabashed romantic and that, in this time and age, is a very good thing when so many of us are trying to be pragmatic about everything in our lives. One needs to step back and view the world in front of us as something wondrous; Stephen does.
Our relationship to nature has changed over the centuries from the fear of the unknown to the celebration of its beauty. Before the urbanization of European and North American society, nature could be a dangerous place where dark things could, and did, happen. Early landscape art reflected these feelings by showing nature as a place best avoided or as a background to human, generally religious, events and, at times, reduced to visual, stock, clichés. However by the mid-17th. Century, landscape painting came into its own as a reflection of the emerging values of humanism. During the 19th. and early 20th. Centuries, landscape painting came to optimize Romantic sensibilities. Today there seems to be little mainstream interest in landscape art perhaps because it does not fit readily into the Postmodern mode except perhaps as a vehicle for irony. Back to Stephen as a romantic--he paints landscape as a window to an understanding of nature, as a thing of beauty. There is no irony in these paintings of the west coast of Newfoundland, only his sense of that what was before his eyes waiting to be discovered by him and now shared with us.
© Virgil Hammock, Sackville NB Canada, Wednesday, 4 September, 2013.