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Show Art Talks . We are cognizant ol three dimensions in nature, of breadth, of height, of depth, not through the eyes, but through our past experience in the handling of objects. ob-jects. As children we bump into the corners of tables and chairs, we hold blocks and tvtlls and stones, and know that they are thick and solid through our fingertips, finger-tips, not our eyes. When one looks at anything in nature, a tree, a series of trees, a house or a barn he sees onTv flat surfaces and the colors that are in them. But he knows th;.'" the tree is round, that the biirr. square, because he has touched a tree and a barn, and this knowledge know-ledge gives the quality of depth, of third dimension to what he sees. The visual world is flat. The painter's problem is to transfer this three dimensional world which he sees without depth to a flat square of canvas, so that his painting appears to have that depth, in other words the painter must put the flat plane, the lights, the colors, of nature onto a canvas in such a manner that what he sees is augmented by what he knows about the nature na-ture before him. We must realize that this is true only of the painter who is concerned with form, and that it is not true of the artist who is more interested in design. The viewer's problem is another thing. By necessity the artist's conception of nature is a personal, and individual one, and therefore demands a personal understanding. There hwo been schools and academies, ac-ademies, especially in France that have given to the men who were their products a sterotyped viewpoint. view-point. But they are of slight consequence. con-sequence. The artist that has the individualistic view point has something to say because he has personal vision. One has only to look at the great men of painting to realize this. To expect an artist ar-tist to conform to a pre-conceived notion of art is to defeat all that is meritorious in him. The artist asks only that one's mind be left open to the leanguage of paint in such a manner that he perceives the individualistic message. The extraction of this message is the problem of those who look at what the artist creates. Painting as language uses form as a vehicle to convey emotion thought, or even propaganda. As lovers of artists works we in America Am-erica are prone to demand the familiar thoughtless reality of nature na-ture where we should seek to understand un-derstand the artist's personal message. I |