On ugliness in art – If art seeks beauty, what is it to do with pain, deformity, terror, revulsion, and disorder? Artists should not simply exclude them, because the world does not exclude them if it can be reflected. Lessing saw this problem in Laocoon. Poetry and sculpture, he argued, do not suffer from the …
Continue reading “Ugliness in Art – Redemption & Romanticism”
The Renaissance did not only restart antiquity, it reordered what could be observed and valued. From the margins, the coarse, the bodily, the obscene, moved into the center of cultural life. In Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, obscenity is no longer a feature of carnival or tolerated disorder. It becomes deliberate, cultivated, and visible within educated …
Greek culture did not claim that the world was wholly beautiful. Its myths include monstrosities, mistakes, and bodies that fall outside any ideal. Plato sharpened that tension into philosophy. Sensible reality, as he saw it, was a diminished copy of a more perfect world of forms. The visible world was not the final standard. It …
Recently my cousin and family member Paul Liebhardt passed away. He worked at NASA for a time and then became a photographer. While a photographer, he traveled internationally. His work as a photographer is well known. The remembrance celebration (link below) shows nice videos and writing of his students coming together from various paths of …
Continue reading “Remembering Family – Photographer Paul Liebhardt”
Walk through a museum and the first signal is chromatic. Marble reads as white, and white reads as pure. Aphrodite and Apollo become an argument before they become a figure: ideal beauty, ideal calm, ideal proportion. Neoclassicism did not merely preserve the antique, it manufactured an antique that could serve as a stable reference for …
The Renaissance, a period of significant intellectual, artistic, and cultural rebirth, marked the combination of art and science, especially through the application of geometric principles in artistic representation. This era witnessed the pioneering development of linear perspective, a technique that revolutionized the way depth and three-dimensional objects were portrayed on two-dimensional surfaces. The mathematical foundation …
A twenty year dream came true this December, 2023, as I traveled to Adelaide, Australia to view John Collier’s Priestess of Delphi (1891), the Oracle, or Pythia. I was able to view the painting for two days. I am not afraid to say that the experience was overwhelming, and I definately had tears in my …
ONCE more the gate behind me falls;Once more before my faceI see the moulder’d Abbey-walls,That stand within the chace.Beyond the lodge the city lies,Beneath its drift of smoke;And ah! with what delighted eyesI turn to yonder oak. For when my passion first began,Ere that, which in me burn’d,The love, that makes me thrice a man,Could …
A combination of Carroll’s famous poem at the Tea Party flying high in van Gogh’s Starry Night. Twinkle, twinkle, little bat, How I wonder where you’re at, Over rooftops, fields, and spires, Beneath the sky that never tires. Casting shadows, broad and deep, Over quiet towns asleep, Like a comet, you draw near, In the …
