Turner Art Quotes

Would Turner have slept through such terrific drama? Absolutely not! Anyone in my business who slept through that would be a fool. I don't keep office hours.

But when you talk about Nabokov and Coover, you’re talking about real geniuses, the writers who weathered real shock and invented this stuff in contemporary fiction. But after the pioneers always come the crank turners, the little gray people who take the machines others have built and just turn the crank, and little pellets of metafiction come out the other end. The crank-turners capitalize for a while on sheer fashion, and they get their plaudits and grants and buy their IRAs and retire to the Hamptons well out of range of the eventual blast radius. There are some interesting parallels between postmodern crank-turners and what’s happened since post-structural theory took off here in the U.S., why there’s such a big backlash against post-structuralism going on now. It’s the crank-turners fault. I think the crank-turners replaced the critic as the real angel of death as far as literary movements are concerned, now. You get some bona fide artists who come along and really divide by zero and weather some serious shit-storms of shock and ridicule in order to promulgate some really important ideas. Once they triumph, though, and their ideas become legitimate and accepted, the crank-turners and wannabes come running to the machine, and out pour the gray pellets and now the whole thing’s become a hollow form, just another institution of fashion. Take a look at some of the critical-theory Ph.D. dissertations being written now. They’re like de Man and Foucault in the mouth of a dull child. Academia and commercial culture have somehow become these gigantic mechanisms of commodification that drain the weight and color out of even the most radical new advances. It’s a surreal inversion of the death-by-neglect that used to kill off prescient art. Now prescient art suffers death-by acceptance. We love things to death, now. Then we retire to the Hamptons.

The arts can sharpen the vision, quicken the intellect, preserve the memory, activate the conscience, enhance the understanding and refresh the language.

No book is ever perfect No piece of art is ever perfect No meal I cook is ever perfect But at some point we have to eat...

In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present,—I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world? Or have I been made for this, to lie in the bed-clothes and keep myself warm?—But this is more pleasant.—Dost thou exist then to take thy pleasure, and not at all for action or exertion? Dost thou not see the little plants, the little birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees working together to put in order their several parts of the universe? And art thou unwilling to do the work of a human being, and dost thou not make haste to do that which, is according to thy nature? But it is necessary to take rest also.—It is necessary. However, Nature has fixed bounds to this too: she has fixed bounds to eating and drinking, and yet thou goest beyond these bounds, beyond what is sufficient; yet in thy acts it is not so, but thou stoppest short of what thou canst do. So thou lovest not thyself, for if thou didst, thou wouldst love thy nature and her will. But those who love their several arts exhaust themselves in working at them unwashed and without food; but thou valuest thy own nature less than the turner values the turning art, or the dancer the dancing art, or the lover of money values his money, or the vain-glorious man his little glory. And such men, when they have a violent affection to a thing, choose neither to eat nor to sleep rather than to perfect the things which they care for. But are the acts which concern society more vile in thy eyes and less worthy of thy labor?

It should also be remembered that art created to change minds often actually does more to bolster the spirit of those already in agreement than it does to convert opponents.

My business is to paint what I see, not what I know is there.

Take your broken heart, make it into art. —CARRIE FISHER • Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved. —HELEN KELLER

How much of life is Christ to be Lord over? Is he only interested in that part of life we think of as religious or spiritual? Or is he interested in every facet of our lives—body, soul, mind and spirit?

Rembrandt didn’t idealize his subjects. He painted what he saw, which was a mixture of glory and fallenness. He was criticized by his contemporaries for using washerwomen as his models rather than women who looked like Greek goddesses.

There is really only one way to restore a world that is dying and in disrepair: to make beauty where ugliness has set in. By beauty, I don’t mean a superficial attractiveness, though the word is commonly used in this way. Beauty is a loveliness admired in its entirety, not just at face value. The beauty I’m referring to is metabolized grief. It includes brokenness and fallibility, and in so doing, conveys for us something deliciously real. Like kintsukuroi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with powdered gold, what is normally seen as a fatal flaw is distinguished with value. When we come into contact with this kind of beauty, it serves as a medicine for the brokenness in ourselves, which then gives us the courage to live in greater intimacy with the world’s wounds.

I hate married men ; they never make any sacrifice to the Arts, but are always thinking of their duty to their wives and families, or some rubbish of that sort .

If there was a day of the week I could skip it would be Monday. Clients had too much time to think and worry over a long weekend and by Monday they were often riddled with fear and anxiety.

A corollary of this has been that Christians have thought that they should only create art with a Pollyanna quality to it: paintings of birds and kittens, movies that extol family life and end happily, songs that are positive and uplifting – in short, works of art that show a world that is almost unfallen where no one experiences conflict and where sin is naughty rather than wicked.

The arts which we now call garden design and landscape design have three separate origins: sacred space, horticultural space and domestic space. Like Homo sapiens, the arts of garden and landscape design probably spread to Europe from West Asia.

To Hope Oh, Hope! thou soother sweet of human woes! How shall I lure thee to my haunts forlorn! For me wilt thou renew the wither’d rose, And clear my painful path of pointed thorn? Ah come, sweet nymph! in smiles and softness drest, Like the young hours that lead the tender year, Enchantress! come, and charm my cares to rest:— Alas! the flatterer flies, and will not hear! A prey to fear, anxiety, and pain, Must I a sad existence still deplore? Lo!—the flowers fade, but all the thorns remain, 'For me the vernal garland blooms no more.' Come then, 'pale Misery’s love!' be thou my cure, And I will bless thee, who, tho’ slow, art sure.

He is a Londoner, too, in his writings. In his familiar letters he displays a rambling urban vivacity, a tendency to to veer off the point and to muddle his syntax. He had a brilliantly eclectic mind, picking up words and images while at the same time forging them in new and unexpected combinations. He conceived several ideas all at once, and sometimes forgot to separate them into their component parts. This was true of his lectures, too, in which brilliant perceptions were scattered in a wilderness of words. As he wrote on another occasion, "The lake babbled not less, and the wind murmured not, nor the little fishes leaped for joy that their tormentor was not." This strangely contorted and convoluted style also characterizes his verses, most of which were appended as commentaries upon his paintings. Like Blake, whose prophetic books bring words and images in exalted combination, Turner wished to make a complete statement. Like Blake, he seemed to consider the poet's role as being in part prophetic. His was a voice calling in the wilderness, and, perhaps secretly, he had an elevated sense of his status and his vocation. And like Blake, too, he was often considered to be mad. He lacked, however, the poetic genius of Blake - compensated perhaps by the fact that by general agreement he is the greater artist.

I’ve had so many influences and sources of inspiration as an illustrator that it is impossible to name just one. I loved Aubrey Beardsley when I was a student, and then Edmund Dulac and other Golden Age illustrators made a big impact, as well as Victorian painters like Richard Dadd and Edward Burne-Jones. My long-term heroes though are Albretch Durer, Brueghel, Hieronymous Bosch, Jan Van Eyck, Leonardo, Botticelli, Rembrandt, Turner and Degas. What most of them have in common is brilliant draughtsmanship and a strong linear or graphic quality. Most are also printmakers. The one I keep going back to and who fascinates me the most is JMW Turner, the greatest watercolourist.

Third, as the ladies have clearly mastered the female art of chastity, our masculine inability to control our urges rather weakens our claims to be the stronger sex.

Keith Tyson, a winner of the Turner Prize, did a piece once where he just got the things already in the gallery and made them into artworks with what he called his ‘magical activation’. So he looked at the light switch and he called it ‘the apocalyptic switch’ and he looked at the light bulb and he called it ‘the light bulb of awareness’. He was using his power as an artist to designate things art, but it was within the art context.

Physically, gardens must have boundaries. Mentally, they can reach to the limits of the known universe. The ideas that bestow such vast extent upon gardens derive from sun, earth, art, water, history, civilization, family, anything.

Humphry Repton, the leading garden theorist of the nineteenth century, defined a garden as 'a piece of ground fenced off from cattle, and appropriated to the use and pleasure or man: it is, or ought to be, cultivated and enriched by art'.

Maybe Jane was right. Maybe he was wrong to have filled her head with tales of Bessie Smith and Josephine Baker, let alone take her to see Jackie Wilson, Etta James, Tina Turner and the Ikettes. Maybe it wasn’t right to wake up to Chico Hamilton, Lee Morgan, Charlie Parker, and Art Blakey in the morning. Watch the sunset with Miles Davis, Cecil Taylor, and Little Willie John. But Greer didn’t know what else to offer that was beautiful and colored and alive, all at the same time.

They whisper: no little man from Customs and Immigration stands at the doors of memory or imagination demanding to see your passport. No arts bureaucrat or ComLit satrap can stamp OzLit, CanLit, FemLit, MigrantLit, or Displaced Person on your visa.

J. M. W. Turner is regarded by many as Britain’s greatest artist, whose works have become iconic symbols of the Romantic art movement. He became known as ‘the painter of light’, due to his increasing interest in brilliant colours and the contrast between light and dark in his many landscapes and seascapes. Turner was born on 23 April 1775 in London. His father, William Turner (1745-1829), was a barber and wig maker and his mother, Mary Marshall, came from a family of butchers. In 1785, his mother suffered from severe mental illness and was admitted first to St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics in Old Street in 1799 and then Bethlem Hospital in 1800, where she died four years later.

J.M.W. Turner's Poem dedicated to Ivan Aivazovsky (1842) Like a curtain slowly drawn It stops suddenly half open, Or, like grief itself, filled with gentle hope, It becomes lighter in the shore-less dark, Thus the moon barely wanes Winding her way above the storm-tossed sea. Stand upon this hill and behold endlessly This scene of a formidable sea, And it will seem to thee a waking dream. That secret mind flowing in thee Which even the day cannot scatter, The serenity of thinking and the beating of the heart Will enchain thee in this vision; This golden-silver moon Standing lonely over the sea, All curtain the grief of even the hopeless. And it appears that through the tempest Moves a light caressing wind, While the sea swells up with a roar, Sometimes, like a battlefield it looks to me The tempestuous sea, Where the moon itself is a brilliant golden crown Of a great king. But even that moon is always beneath thee Oh Master most high, Oh forgive thou me If even this master was frightened for a moment Oh, noble moment, by art betrayed… And how may one not delight in thee, Oh thou young boy, but forgive thou me, If I shall bend my white head Before thy art divine Thy bliss-wrought genius...

I could scarcely remember a time when I was not haunted by the idea of slavery, or was not profoundly conscious of the strange bifurcated world of whiteness and blackness in which I was born and reared. In the Virginia Tidewater region of my beginnings, heavily populated by blacks, society remained firmly in the grip of the Jim Crow laws and their ordinance of a separate and thoroughly unequal way of life. The evidence was blatant and embarrassing even to some white children, like myself, who were presumably brought up to be indifferent to such inequities as the ramshackle black school that stood on the route we traveled to our own up-to-date and well-equipped edifice, with its swank state-of-the-art public address system, very advanced for the late 1930s. Many black schools in Virginia at that time had outside privies. Despite

The world is moving into a phase when landscape design may well be recognized as the most comprehensive of the arts. Man creates around him an environment that is a projection into nature of his abstract ideas. It is only in the present century that the collective landscape has emerged as a social necessity. We are promoting a landscape art on a scale never conceived of in history (Geoffrey Jellicoe, Landscape of man)

I learned to listen to my heart, which taught me that you and I are connected to each other and everything else on this planet. We are joined together by the mysterious nature of life itself, the fundamental creative energy of the universe. In this complicated world of ours, where contradictions abound, we find breathtaking beauty in the most unlikely places. The brightest rainbows appear after the heaviest of storm clouds. Magnificent butterflies emerge from the drabbest cocoons. And the most beautiful lotus flowers bloom from the deepest and thickest mud. Why do you suppose life works this way? Perhaps those rainbows, butterflies, and lotus flowers are meant to remind us that our world is a mystical work of art—a universal canvas upon which we all paint our stories, day by day, through the brushstrokes of our thoughts, words, and deeds.

Come on, Gray,” another sailor called. “Just one toast.” Miss Turner raised her eyebrows and leaned into him. “Come on, Mr. Grayson. Just one little toast,” she taunted, in the breathy, seductive voice of a harlot. It was a voice his body knew well, and vital parts of him were quickly forming a response. Siren. “Very well.” He lifted his mug and his voice, all the while staring into her wide, glassy eyes. “To the most beautiful lady in the world, and the only woman in my life.” The little minx caught her breath. Gray relished the tense silence, allowing a broad grin to spread across his face. “To my sister, Isabel.” Her eyes narrowed to slits. The men groaned. “You’re no fun anymore, Gray,” O’Shea grumbled. “No, I’m not. I’ve gone respectable.” He tugged on Miss Turner’s elbow. “And good little governesses need to be in bed.” “Not so fast, if you please.” She jerked away from him and turned to face the assembled crew. “I haven’t made my toast yet. We ladies have our sweethearts too, you know.” Bawdy murmurs chased one another until a ripple of laughter caught them up. Gray stepped back, lifting his own mug to his lips. If the girl was determined to humiliate herself, who was he to stop her? Who was he, indeed? Swaying a little in her boots, she raised her tankard. “To Gervais. My only sweetheart, mon cher petit lapin.” My dear little rabbit? Gray sputtered into his rum. What a fanciful imagination the chit had. “My French painting master,” she continued, slurring her words, “and my tutor in the art of passion.” The men whooped and whistled. Gray plunked his mug on the crate and strode to her side. “All right, Miss Turner. Very amusing. That’s enough joking for one evening.” “Who’s joking?” she asked, lowering her mug to her lips and eyeing him saucily over the rim. “He loved me. Desperately.” “The French do everything desperately,” he muttered, beginning to feel a bit desperate himself. He knew she was spinning naïve schoolgirl tales, but the others didn’t. The mood of the whole group had altered, from one of good-natured merriment to one of lust-tinged anticipation. These were sailors, after all. Lonely, rummed-up, woman-starved, desperate men. And to an innocent girl, they could prove more dangerous than sharks. “He couldn’t have loved you too much, could he?” Gray grabbed her arm again. “He seems to have let you go.” “I suppose he did.” She sniffed, then flashed a coquettish smile at the men. “I suppose that means I need a new sweetheart.” That was it. This little scene was at its end. Gray crouched, grasping his wayward governess around the thighs, and then straightened his legs, tossing her over one shoulder. She let out a shriek, and he felt the dregs of her rum spill down the back of his coat. “Put me down, you brute!” She squirmed and pounded his back with her fists. Gray bound her legs to his chest with one arm and gave her a pat on that well-padded rump with the other. “Well, then,” he announced to the group, forcing a roguish grin, “we’ll be off to bed.” Cheers and coarse laughter followed them as Gray toted his wriggling quarry down the companionway stairs and into the ladies’ cabin. With another light smack to her bum that she probably couldn’t even feel through all those skirts and petticoats, Gray slid her from his shoulder and dropped her on her feet. She wobbled backward, and he caught her arm, reversing her momentum. Now she tripped toward him, flinging her arms around his neck and sagging against his chest. Gray just stood there, arms dangling at his sides. Oh, bloody hell.

Make good decisions and remember who loves you." I looked at him. "I thought it was 'remember who you are.'" The Butler looked back at me. "It is the very same thing," he said. "What?" "Young Master Carter, when you walk Ned for your mother; when you attend Miss Anne's robotics competition without observing that such attendance is, if you'll pardon the expression, 'a pain in the glutes'; when you cheer at Miss Charlotte's football match even though she barely had a touch; when you accompany your sister to a Turner art exhibition; when you take your young sisters to buy Dreamsicles; when you appear as exhibit A for Miss Emily's Favorite Person of the Week event; when you attend two ballet exhibitions despite your unfortunate and undiscerning distaste for the art; you are telling them that it is the same thing." "Is that sort of what being a gentleman is supposed to be?" "We are what we love, young Master Carter.

. You get some bona fide artists who come along and really divide by zero and weather some serious shit-storms of shock and ridicule in order to promulgate some really important ideas. Once they triumph, though, and their ideas become legitimate and accepted, the crank-turners and wannabes come running to the machine, and out pour the gray pellets and now the whole thing’s become a hollow form, just another institution of fashion. Take a look at some of the critical-theory Ph.D. dissertations being written now. They’re like de Man and Foucault in the mouth of a dull child. Academia and commercial culture have somehow become these gigantic mechanisms of commodification that drain the weight and color out of even the most radical new advances. It’s a surreal inversion of the death-by-neglect that used to kill off prescient art. Now prescient art suffers death-by acceptance. We love things to death, now. Then we retire to the Hamptons.

to substitute for the bulk of it what was art still, to introduce, as it might be, several ‘thicknesses’ of art; instead of photographs of Chartres Cathedral, of the Fountains of Saint-Cloud, or of Vesuvius she would inquire of Swann whether some great painter had not made pictures of them, and preferred to give me photographs of ‘Chartres Cathedral’ after Corot, of the ‘Fountains of Saint-Cloud’ after Hubert Robert, and of ‘Vesuvius’ after Turner, which were a stage higher in the scale of art.

By the close of the nineteenth century her studies with her father were being supplemented by tuition in the classics from Dr Warr of King’s College, Kensington, and from Clara Pater, sister of the English essayist and critic Walter Pater (1839–94). Woolf was very fond of Clara and an exchange between them later became the basis for her short story ‘Moments of Being: Slater’s Pins Have No Points’ (1928). Thoby boarded at Clifton College, Bristol, Adrian was a dayboy at Westminster School, and Vanessa attended Cope’s School of Art. Thoby, and later Adrian, eventually went to Trinity College, Cambridge, and Vanessa undertook training in the visual arts (attending the Slade School of Fine Art for a while). From 1902 Virginia’s tuition in classics passed from Clara Pater to the very capable Janet Case, one of the first graduates from Girton College, Cambridge, and a committed feminist. The sisters visited Cambridge a number of times to meet Thoby, whose friends there included Clive Bell 1881–1964), Lytton Strachey (1880– 1932), Leonard Woolf (1880–1969) and Saxon Sydney-Turner.

WRITING GUIDES AND REFERENCES: A SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY The Artful Edit, by Susan Bell (Norton) The Art of Time in Memoir, by Sven Birkerts (Graywolf Press) The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard (Harper & Row) Writing with Power, by Peter Elbow (Oxford University Press) Writing Creative Nonfiction, edited by Carolyn Forché and Philip Gerard (Story Press) Tough, Sweet and Stuffy, by Walker Gibson (Indiana University Press) The Situation and the Story, by Vivian Gornick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Intimate Journalism: The Art and Craft of Reporting Everyday Life, by Walt Harrington (Sage) On Writing, by Stephen King (Scribner) Telling True Stories, edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call (Plume) Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott (Pantheon) The Forest for the Trees, by Betsy Lerner (Riverhead) Unless It Moves the Human Heart, by Roger Rosenblatt (Ecco) The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White (Macmillan) Clear and Simple as the Truth, by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner (Princeton University Press) Word Court, by Barbara Wallraff (Harcourt) Style, by Joseph M. Williams and Gregory G. Colomb (Longman) On Writing Well, by William Zinsser (Harper & Row) The Chicago Manual of Style, by University of Chicago Press staff (University of Chicago Press) Modern English Usage, by H. W. Fowler, revised edition by Sir Ernest Gowers (Oxford University Press) Modern American Usage, by Wilson Follett (Hill and Wang) Words into Type, by Marjorie E. Skillin and Robert M. Gay (Prentice-Hall) To CHRIS, SAMMY, NICK, AND MADDIE, AND TO TOMMY, JAMIE, THEODORE, AND PENNY

Having lasted for 4,000 years, the use of nature's materials to express ideas about nature may be expected to continue. The best garden designs are produced with an awareness of the art, science, history, geography, philosophy, social habits and construction techniques of their period.

From 50 centuries, we can learn about the close relationship between garden design and urban design, because both arts involve the composition of buildings with paving, landform, water, vegetation and climate.

Modernism', as a label, has currency in the arts, architecture, planning, landscape, politics, theology, cultural history and elsewhere.

In a 1963 performance entitled "Who R U?" at the San Francisco Museum of Art, Stern and Callahan added highway sounds to the mix, moving them from speaker to speaker in the showroom. They also had individuals placed in booths around a central auditorium, miked their conversations, and replayed them simultaneously in an eighteen-channel remix. By 1965 this show had morphed into a program called "We R All One," in which USCO deployed slide and film projections, oscilloscopes, music, strobes, and live dancers to create a sensory cacophony. At the end of the performance, the lights would go down, and for ten minutes the audience would hear multiple "Om's" from the speakers. According to Stern, the show was designed to lead viewers from "overload to spiritual meditation."19 In the final moments, the audience was to experience the mystical unity that ostensibly bound together USCO's members.

A Bíblia não nos diz como produzir programas de de rádio ou editar jornais, mas tem muito a dizer sobre prioridades. (p. 89)

Emin’s My Bed, which was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize, consisted of an unmade bed complete with bottles of vodka, used prophylactics, and bloodied undergarments. While on display at the Tate Gallery in 1999, the bed was vandalized by two nude men who proceeded to jump on it and drink the vodka. The world of modern art being what it is, everyone at the gallery applauded, assuming that the vandalism was part of the show. Emin is now employed as a professor at the European Graduate School.

Tino Sehgal, nominated for the Turner Prize, sets up unsettling human interactions for people: children spouting fluent art speak, gallery attendants who engage you in philosophical debate, performers provoking the audience to talk about them. Tino is so dedicated to this dematerialized version of art that he won’t even allow any photographs or recordings of his work.

Andrew Jackson was both mind and muscle united into the essential personality of the Pioneer. He was shrewd, practical and courageous. He also hated Indians and had no interest in land except as it could be turned to what were then styled the "arts of civilization," i.e., agriculture and industry.

SELF PORTRAIT, 1799 In this early self portrait we can note the subtle blend of light and dark, illuminating the face of the young twenty-four year old artist. Dating from around 1799, the painting was most likely intended to mark Turner’s election as a full member of the Royal Academy, a momentous occasion for any aspiring artist. This meant that he could now exhibit his works on the walls of the Academy without fear of rejection by any members of the committee. Despite his relative youth, Turner had already made a name for himself as an original, accomplished painter with the technical abilities of someone many years more experienced. He had been described in London newspapers as an artist that ‘seems thoroughly to understand the mode of adjusting and applying his various materials’ and ‘their effect in oil or on paper is equally sublime’. The portrait, which is now housed in Tate Britain, depicts a confident young man, who stares assertively at the viewer, hinting at his ambitions and skilled abilities as an artist.

The subject for both of them was the light, but for Constable the light was through the clouds, it had a kind of filter quality. [For] Turner it was the sunlight, pure and simple. The sun, absolutely. He's supposed to have said on his deathbed that the sun is God—that's not what he said. He said, 'I'd love to see the sun again.' That's what he said, and wouldn't we all.

His brothers had passed from discussion of art to some new philosophical text that had recently been released to great acclaim. Naturally, Ash hadn’t read it. In fact, he hadn’t even heard of it. Next to them, Ash felt profoundly empty and wistfully ignorant. He’d been trying to scrape together a fortune at fourteen, so that his younger brothers could study Latin declensions. He’d succeeded. But he hadn’t known that in so doing, he was guaranteeing that he would never again have the privilege of engaging either of them in meaningful conversation. Mark and Smite were bound together with the threads of a thousand common experiences, everything from the hidden truth of those years when Ash had been gone, to their time at university. And Ash would never, ever be able to share any of that with them.

The stench of death and blood hit me hard. In the room's corner, blood had pooled and hardened over parts of the slated wood floor near the bedroom window. There was also blood spattered against the corner walls. The room was sparse, filled with the essentials of an old man. The bed looked slept in. A small painting in an ornate frame hung on the wall above it. It was a print from one of William Turner’s works, an English painter from the early 1980s. It depicted a ship, capsized with its crew in lifeboats struggling against a powerful storm.

I've been strongly influenced, in technique as well as subject matter, by some of the early 20th-century book illustrators — Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac in particular, Burne-Jones and other Pre-Raphaelites, and the Arts-&-Crafts movement they engendered. I'm continually inspired by Rembrandt, Breughel (I've wondered whether his brilliant "Tower of Babel" had inspired Tolkien's description of Minas Tyrith), Hieronymous Bosch, Albrecht Durer, and Turner; it's not necessarily that they influence my work in any particular direction, more that their example raises my spirits, re-affirms my belief in the power of images to move and delight us, and shows me how much further I have to go, how much is possible. Having visited Venice and Florence for the first time, I am besotted with the Italian Renaissance artists — Botticelli, Bellini, da Vinci and others. Their work is calm, controlled, and yet each face and landscape contains such passion. In Botticelli's paintings, every pebble and every leaf is rendered with a religious devotion; there is reverence inherent in paying such close attention to every stone, turning painting itself into a form of worship, an act of prayer.

Her eyes narrowed as she realised just what Ian was. "You’re a filthy Debasement!" "Maybe. But damned if I’m the one eating kiddie-snacks in the middle ofnowhere while admiring modern art.

So often Christian artists feel that their role is to take on the enemy, whereas they would produce better and more accessible work if they dealt with the contradictions, waverings, and weaknesses within themselves.

Any honest reflection on life will deal with imperfection. The difference in a Christian artist’s work should be that the depraved will seem depraved, and the ugly will seem ugly. Christians should be distinguished from those who suggest that depravity is normal or that evil is good.

In a similar way, the arts can act on God’s side by preserving beauty and drawing out the highest achievements capable by humans. The arts can help preserve and renew cultures, and this is a good thing in itself.

A moral standard does exist in the universe, and any sin not already punished on the cross will be dealt with on Judgment Day.

The secular mind frequently doesn’t face up to the full implications of its beliefs; art can provide a timely shock that results in a reassessment.

There is a need for wisdom in art. Shock, surprise, novelty, and innovation helped to grab attention but are not substantial in themselves.

As the art historian Meyer Schapiro has said of expressionist and post-expressionist painting, “the subjective becomes tangible,” by which he means that on a canvas by, say, Monet or Cézanne, we see in “the mark, the stroke, the brush, the drip”—none of which is effaced or concealed—“the drama of decision in the ongoing process of art.” Melville’s creative process in Moby-Dick was the verbal equivalent of the “tangible subjectivity” that he had seen in the canvases of Turner. As the English critic Henry Chorley wrote astutely in 1850, “Mr. Melville stands as far apart from any past or present marine painter in pen and ink as Turner does” from lesser painters.

No, mate. It isn't. He needs to lose himself in his own little world right now. He needs his art.

Searching for models in art as well as literature, he had roamed the picture galleries during his trip to London, visiting the Dulwich and Vernon collections, the newly established National Gallery, the royal collections at Hampton Court and Windsor Castle, and the vast private collection of Samuel Rogers. He had seen seascapes by Canaletto and Claude Lorrain, and was particularly drawn to those of J. M. W. Turner, in which he saw intimations of what, in Moby-Dick, he was to call the “howling infinite.

It’s important that you don’t leave your reader in the dark about characters’ subtext. Inexperienced writers often make this mistake, leaving it out of the narration completely. I come across this frequently in reviewing emerging writers’ manuscripts. I think it’s because they’re relying on how they hear and see the scene in their head, as though they’re watching a lively film. No wonder: ours is a film culture; we’re saturated by films. But a novel is not a film. In a film there is an actor skillfully showing every nuance of emotion, giving rich life to dialogue that might reveal nothing on the words’ surface. The actor is playing the subtext, and the viewer sees it. A film also gets the potent boost of a music score composed to stir specific emotions in the viewer. But that experience does not exist for the reader of a novel. The novelist does not enjoy the luxury of having an actor effortlessly reveal complex meaning with a single look, and a musical score to emphasize it. When subtext is necessary, the novelist must write it, write the character’s precise thoughts and feelings. Imagine the scene above stripped of its written subtext. It would be Cardinal simply saying, “Hi, Kelly. How’s school going?” and Kelly chattering on about her art, without the author giving us Cardinal’s emotional state as he listens. The reader would have no hint of the love Cardinal longs to convey with his words, but can’t.

We all have a variety of ways of avoiding our ‘darkness’ (wherein lies all our wounds/hurts/betrayals/ grief/loss etc.), ways of practicing a type of conscious forgetfulness in order to not to have to look at that place within us. However, there are times and occasions when we either choose to look into our ‘pit’ or we fall in, and we can become afraid, sad, or angry.

As unlikely as it sounds, the Civil War battlefields are where the first Breathing+ technique begins. It was 1862 and Jacob Mendez Da Costa had just arrived at Turner’s Lane Hospital in Philadelphia.

During an interlude of peace in 1802, a consortium of patrons clubbed together to send Turner to Paris, in order to study in the Louvre. To begin with, he embarked on a tour of the Alps, whose sublime beauty and constant climatic change taught the young artist the awesome scale and mutability of nature. The Alpine tour resulted in some spectacular watercolours and oil paintings. Although he never witnessed an avalanche himself, an account of a devastating one in the Grisons prompted Turner to create the following painting in 1810. The tragic event occurred at Selva, killing twenty-five people. The canvas depicts huge rocks, driven before the weight of snow, crashing down upon a small chalet. Turner opted to portray not a single human figure, concentrating on the unparalleled might of nature instead.

Noa sleeps with the curtains open, allowing as much moonlight as possible to flood her bedroom, allowing her to see each and every picture on the walls, if only as a pale glimmer. It took Noa weeks to perfect the art display. Reproductions of Monet's gardens at Giverny blanket one wall: thousands of violets- smudges of purples and mauves- and azaleas, poppies, and peonies, tulips and roses, water lilies in pastel pinks floating on serene lakes reflecting weeping willows and shimmers of sunshine. Turner's sunsets adorn another: bright eyes of gold at the center of skies and seas of searing magenta or soft blue. The third wall is splashed with Jackson Pollocks: a hundred different colors streaked and splattered above Noa's bed. The fourth wall is decorated by Rothko: blocks of blue and red and yellow blending and bleeding together. The ceiling is papered with the abstract shapes of Kandinsky: triangles, circles, and lines tumbling over one another in energetic acrobatics.

I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.” Pablo Picasso had said that fifty years ago.

In 1919, the year women were first able to vote in Austria, Weininger's ideas on the "emancipation question" were being newly debated; the Christian Socials feared that the polls would be overrun with radicals, while less activist women, more likely to vote conservative, would stay away (they proposed that voting should be obligatory). Weininger thought that women were passive, purely sexual beings - even though they weren't fully conscious of their sexuality - who longed to be dominated. They were therefore not fully in possession of their reason, and not worthy of the vote. He believed that only men were capable of rationality and genius. By transcending sexuality and the body, exercising sexual restraint that women were incapable, men were able to allow these energies to be sublimated into the disinterested realms of art and politics. "Man possesses the penis," Weininger explained, in an aphorism that was to become popular, "but the vagina possesses the woman".

Only sanitary art could reach the highest ideals of beauty, Ruskin theorized. Rembrandt’s canvases, Ruskin specifically objected, were “unromantic and unhygienic.” By contrast, he extolled J. M. W. Turner’s landscapes for their bright colors extending even to white, and for their direct depiction of sunlight. Such work, according to Ruskin, was modern, hygienic, and romantic. Sanitation helped to further a change of style and sensibility in the arts, associating modernity with clarity of line, bright tones, and vivid colors. All that was dark was dirty, stinky, and abhorrent.