It was the first ever exhibition of Fra Angelico’s works in France and the Musée Jacquemart-André was able to acquire almost 25 pieces for the show.  This was quite a feat considering Fra Angelico’s fragile works are very rarely transported.  Along with Fra Angelico there were works by his fellow monk and teacher, Lorenzo Monaco, as well as Masolino, Gentile da Fabriano, Lippo Lippi, Paolo Uccello and his student Benozzo Gozzoli.  Through Fra Angelico and these exceptional painters we are able to understand the progession of artistic development which occurred in Florence during the first half of the 1400s.

As masterful as he is in portraying paintings worthy of deep religious contemplation and meaning, Fra Angelico was a leading thinker and technician in the new and innovative approaches of image making.  In his ability to show perspective and form we can see the leap that Fra Angelico made over the generation of artists preceding him in Florence.  We get a sense of this in two cases, where Fra Angelico treats similar subjects as Gentile da Fabriano and Lorenzo Monaco, both masters in the school of International Gothic painting.  In the depiction of Saint Francis receiving the stigmata, Fra Angelico is able to covey much more space and form than in Gentile da Fabriano’s version.

"St. Francis," Gentile da Fabriano

"St Francis Receiving the Stigmata and the Death of St Peter Martyr," Fra Angelico

Exhibited side by side in the show, Lorenzo Monaco’s “Miracle of Saint Nicholas” and Fra Angelico’s “Thebaide” are quite astonishing in illustrating the contrast and progression in portraying sea and landscapes.  Monaco’s depiction of the sea is as a pattern made up of spirals.  Fra Angelico conveys a real sense of depth in the the gradations and the changes in scale and detail.

"Miracle of Saint Nicholas," Lorenzo Monaco

"Thebaide," Fra Angelico (click to enlarge)

Regarding Thebaide, it is remarkable how Fra Angelico was able to paint so much in such a small space, from monks praying and reading,  beautiful naturalistic animals, light falling on plants and trees, to the texture of the earth, which Fra Angelico achieved by using a pointillist approach.

"Thebaide (Detail)," Fra Angelico

We also find that Fra Angelico delves deeper than his contemporaries in exploring the uses of new artistic innovations.  Taken from the museum’s permanent collection the use of perspective in “Paolo Uccello’s Saint George and the Dragon” is effective but a bit arbitrary to the main subject.  On the other hand, in “The Story of St. Nicholas,” Fra Angelico uses linear perspective as a means to intertwine three narratives in a coherent manner.  For Fra Angelico, perspective is a useful tool to amplify his intentions, whether it is a narrative or an idea.

"Saint George and the Dragon," Paolo Uccello

"The Story of Saint Nicholas," Fra Angelico

The exhibition is called “Fra Angelico and the Masters of Light” and it is an apt title. Fra Angelico’s paintings are rich with color, light and gold.  Fra Angelico was a master of gold leaf.  In his “Virgin and Child” we notice not just the gorgeous designs and patterns in the haloes but the way the gold curtain turns and folds in his magnificent tooling of the gold.

"Virgin and Child," Fra Angelico

Light permeates Fra Angelico’s paintings in his use of color.  When colors go in to shadow they never get too dark, only more pure in their hue.  Each color is distinct, pure and balanced throughout the painting.  There is a mosaic quality in some of Fra Angelico’s busier paintings where figures are cut out from one another by the offset of colors.  This is visible in the triptych “The Ascension, The Last Judgement and the Pentecost” where through a balance of pinks, blues, reds and golds each figure is clearly delineated and the composition remains balanced. I found this painting to be captivating for many reasons, especially the solidity and beauty of Christ, in particular the drapery over his legs as he pronounces the Last Judgement.

"The Ascension, Last Judgement and Pentecost," Fra Angelico

At the end of the exhibition we find a video showing the works at the monastery in San Marco.  Frescoed on the walls in each cell are scenes from the life of Christ.  There is a sobriety and gravity to the images and we are reminded of the religious sentiment and conviction in Fra Angelico’s work.  Perhaps this is why his paintings are so moving; with all his technical know-how we still find a sweet simplicity and clarity in his panels and frescoes. Fra Angelico’s works do reflect the intellectual achievements of his age but ultimately it is the pureness and deep spirituality in his own heart that makes his work so moving and unforgettable.

-Jun-Pierre Shiozawa

"Coronation of the Virgin," Fra Angelico

"Saint Cecilia," John William Waterhouse

The exhibition, “Beauty, Morals and Voluptuousness in the England of Oscar Wilde” currently on display at the museum was our first destination, shows works that were created under the “Aesthetic Movement” occurring in Britain during the second half of the 19th century.  The Aesthetics were invested in making works of beauty without overarching meanings that went beyond the piece itself.  It was “art for art sake,” a stance that permeated the culture in Victorian England in art, design, fashion, literature and poetry.

It was a movement which started in painting reacting against everything from the gritty realist art of Gustave Courbet to the ugliness found in mass industry.  John Ruskin’s idea of art as the ultimate in human endeavor was challenged by Ruskin’s rival in later life, French born, American painter John McNeil Whistler, a major figure in the movement.  Whistler stated, “art should stand alone and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism”.  The Aesthetics aimed to make their world more beautiful, using influences as wide in scope as ancient Egypt, the early Italian Renaissance, classical Greece, Japanese tapestries and ukiyo-e, chinese porcelain bowls and illuminated manuscripts.

"Summer Solstice," Albert Moore

It must have been an exciting time, experiencing the effects of globalism in London in the second half of 19th century.  The Acropolis marbles that were taken from Athens and placed in the British Museum impressed many artists in England.  Soon after, images portraying life in idealized ancient Greece and Rome became the rage.  Albert Moore’s “Summer Solstice” depicts a sleeping toga-clad Greek fanned by attendants.  Lawrence Alma-Tadema, one of the most successful artist/designers of his day, is represented by pieces of furniture that drew inspiration from Greco-Roman design motifs.  In the exhibition we also find a small, gorgeous  Alma-Tadema painting of a woman resting in a Roman bathhouse titled “Tepidarium.”

"In the Tepidarium," Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Through Whistler we see works greatly influenced by Japanese design and color principles.  Often the models in his paintings are wearing kimonos and holding Japanese fans.  His pieces are often titled with references to music, such as ”Symphony in White,”  “Harmony in Gray and Green, and “Nocturne: Blue and Gold.”

"Nocturne: Blue and Gold - Old Battersea Bridge," James McNeil Whistler

Whether it is a portrait of a statesman or his own mother, it is the composition and arrangement of colors that seem to be of paramount importance to Whistler.   Blurring the eyes, Whistler’s portrait of Thomas Carlyle, “Arrangement in Black and Gray No. 2″ becomes a play of positive and negative shapes.  Whistler was a designer as well.  There is an interactive digital video of his masterpiece, the “Peacock Room,” a room entirely designed and painted for shipping tycoon Frederick Leyland for his Chinese porcelain collection.  Art as design and as decor–this is the trend that soon emerges throughout this exhibition of the Aesthetic movement.

"Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 2," James McNeill Whistler

Works by many of the preeminent Pre-Raphaelites are included with paintings depicting innocent maidens with doe-eyed expressions. The figures in the works of Edward Burne-Jones are reminiscent of Botticelli with languishing looks and red lips and hair.  The spaces in his paintings are much denser however, flat and patterned like a medieval tapestry.

"Laus Veneris," Edward Burne-Jones

Where is Oscar Wilde in all this?  Quotes from a wide range of his writings are to be found stenciled throughout the exhibition.  Through Wilde’s insights and musings he plays the role of a guide, explaining to the viewer how such an artistic movement could have had such an effect on the London of his time.  “I am finding it harder and harder to live up to my blue china,” he quipped, shedding light on the craze for imported Chinese plates.  For what starts as the ideas and motivations of mid 19th century painters Dante Rossetti and William Morris in painting grows into a cultural movement that permeates the aristocratic classes, the way they dressed themselves and their homes, and the places they went and with whom.

Peacock Feathers’ furnishing fabric, Arthur Silver

One is struck by how much was made within the spirit of Aesthetism: everything from chairs to wallpaper to whole rooms; it was an industry unto itself.  We find with all the myriad objects and images collected in this exhibition the Aesthetic movement feels like a passing fashion, one that made its mark and then moved on.  To find a real revolution one must go up to the fifth floor of the Musée d’Orsay and see the works that were painted at roughly the same time across the English Channel in Paris.  There the works of Monet, Degas, Cezanne and the rest of the Impressionists truly challenged the way people thought about art and beauty.

“Beauty, Morals and Voluptuousness in the England of Oscar Wilde” shows us that the Aesthetic movement was such a mix of ideas and influences that we need some sort of anchor to comprehend how the whole movement fits into our understanding of art history and the world at that time.  Wilde provides the anchor.   As beautiful as it is, the art of Wilde’s world, that of Victorian England, simply reflects the man’s refined tastes and trappings. The Aesthetic Movement aspired to little else in their philosophy of art.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.  All art is quite useless.  — From “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde

-Jun-Pierre Shiozawa

During the holiday season in Paris there is a multitude of art exhibitions on display to tempt tourists and locals alike.  As I was fortunate enough to be in Paris during the New Year’s festivities, I was able to enjoy a number of the shows and museums, indulging in artwork of all kinds.  I will be writing three reviews of exhibitions I visited while in Paris, “The Wyeths: Three Generations of American Artists” at the Mona Bismark Foundation, “Beauty, Morals and Voluptuousness in the England of Oscar Wilde” at the Musée d’Orsay and “Fra Angelico and the Masters of Light” at the Musée Jacquemart-André.

If one is determined, in a week they can cover a lot of ground in a city like Paris, where strolling is pleasant and the metro is easily accessible.  The first exhibition I saw was “The Wyeths: Three Generations of American Artists” at the small and charming Mona Bismark Foundation, across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower.  The show features the works of painter and illustrator, N.C. Wyeth, his son Andrew, perhaps the most important figurative American painter of the 20th century, and his grandson Jamie. The draw is quite rightly Andrew, but from the collected works we get an idea of the evolution of one of the truly great American artists and his family legacy.

"Sir Nigel Sustains Englands Honor" NC Wyeth

The exhibition starts with bright, dramatic paintings by N.C. that were used to vividly illustrate stories such as Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe and King Arthur.  N.C.’s paintings are bold and direct, depicting the tales of swashbuckling pirates, soldiers and knights.  There is no ambiguity in NC’s pieces and his brushwork and color are always sure and confident.  Perhaps the lack of subtlety in N.C.’s works may be cause for criticism, but it is clear that he was a painter of suberb technical skill and range.  NC’s work is a helpful introduction to the formation of his son, Andrew.  We could even find Andrew drawing in on of NC’s paintings,  “Eight Bells” hunched over his drawing in N.C.’s lobster boat off the coast of Maine.

"Eight Bells," N.C. Wyeth

In contrast with N.C.’s colorful, almost theatrical paintings, Andrew’s works, mostly in egg tempera or watercolor, are by contrast subdued, still and personal.  There are no classics in this exhibtion, no “Christina’s World,” but instead intimate depictions of  Andrew’s immediate surroundings: his neighbors, his studio window, his barn, his boots, etc.

"Boots (study for Trodden Weed)", Andrew Wyeth

Around the time of his father’s death from a car crash in 1945, Andrew’s color palette changes, and gone are the vivid blues and reds of his earlier watercolors, replaced with muted browns and grays.  Andrew’s ability to capture his subjects in fine detail is breathtaking.  Yet, in their balance, design and tone, it is the compostional arrangements in Andrew’s paintings which sustain the viewer, elevating  his pieces from being simply well observed landscapes and portraits, to poetic and intensely personal works.  When we see his paintings we get a sense of seeing not just through the eye of Andrew Wyeth, but through his temperament and sensibilities. In so doing we get a sense of the man himself.

"Helga" Andrew Wyeth

After Andrew, the show continues with the paintings of his son, Jamie.  If the Wyeth show were a three course meal, then N.C.’s contribution would be a spicy beef tataki appetizer, Andrew’s would be an aromatic and delicately prepared salmon fillet with herbs and Jamie’s would be a cheeseburger, some fishsticks, and a cheesecake for dessert.  That is to say that there is a whole lot of Jamie’s work in the exhibition, and the range is wide, most of which are a far cry from the paintings of his father and grandfather.  Jamie is a competent painter and he has works of true merit but they would do better in a personal retrospective only.  In “The Wyeths” exhibition, it is a bit like having cheesecake after one has reached a sufficiency.

"Tempest," Jamie Wyeth

“The Wyeths: Three Generations of American Artists” is a show that doesn’t have enough work from its star draw, but his pieces alone are worth the trip.  N.C.’s works are enjoyable and Jamie’s portraits are worthy of note, but ultimately, “The Wyeths” highlights Andrew Wyeth as the supreme painter of his renowned family.   The exhibition is a fine example of the power of the subdued.  N.C.’s paintings are dynamic.  Jamie has many of all kinds.   Yet, Andrew with only a select few watercolors, egg temperas and drawings makes the biggest impact.

-Jun-Pierre Shiozawa

"Garret Room," Andrew Wyeth

The National Gallery in London is hosting a show entitled  “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan”  which opened last month and focuses on his time as court painter to Ludovico Maria Sforza.
The  exhibition sold out in the first week but we were fortunate enough to get tickets in advance. On view are 7 paintings,  60  drawings, 33 of which are from the Royal Collection. This makes the show a unique opportunity to  see an artist at work, thinking through ideas and culling through various postures and positions for compositions.  The paintings are surrounded by preparatory drawings, some of which relate directly to the work on display.  The most sensitive drawings are those done on prepared paper with silverpoint and white highlights.  This means that the paper was covered with a layer of  animal hide glue mixed with pigments, in this case usually blue.  The drawings were done on this ground with a fine piece of silver wire, carefully and gently touched to the paper and built up in intensity by continued stroking.  The white highlighting is  probably pigment mixed with egg tempera  applied with a brush.  Looking closely at these drawings I could barely see the strokes of the brush in many cases leading me to believe that he may have just tapped the pigment on, dotting it onto the paper with a tiny brush.  These drawings were more delicate and refined than I had imagined before I saw them in person.  They are small in scale, perhaps extracted from sketchbooks. Other drawings were done with pen and ink, the diagonal shading lines revealing the left-handedness of the artist. Leonardo believed that he could reveal scientific truths about the world thorough deep and clear observation.  These intense and precise drawings give us insight into the physical world as well as into the mind of the artist himself.  Leonardo’s sketches of human anatomy are still among the most admired drawings of their kind.
The crowds were rather overwhelming but we managed to spend time with each piece. A companion of mine remarked that she found the paintings rather cold. Indeed, Leonardo is not appealing to our heart but to our head.  His intellectual  approach demands a quiet and intense engagement with the work which was rather difficult at times with the press of people. Still I found time to inspect each piece. It is interesting to note how much of each composition was left unfinished, revealing the underdrawing in many cases.  Leonardo was known for leaving his paintings incomplete, but it is hard to determine how much of this is out of neglect or if he purposely chose to leave areas as they were first drawn.  His exquisite angel in The Virgin of the Rocks  (from  London) has perfectly realized  features but his hand is a smear of lines on the back of the baby Jesus.  The paintings are full of these inconsistencies. He was among the first Renaissance artists to use light rather than color to direct the eye.  His sfumato, or smokey, technique reveals and disguises edges leading the viewer through his rocky landscapes and over the curvature of the human visage.
John and I were able to see the show two days in a row, thanks to his foresight in purchasing tickets.  It is an education for modern artists to see such an sumptuous body of work, to understand better the process of a great genius. I also plan to apply some of the things I learned to my own methods this winter.  There is no greater joy than having new inspiration and the National Gallery show has provided ample opportunity to imbue some Leonardo.

-Jane Morris Pack

Paros is a small island, and at times it feels it. As an artist especially, we walk around living in our work and our minds. It gets real easy to spend an entire week in the town, making art, interacting with other students and the locals, until all of a sudden Paros feels like this tiny little rock comprised wholly of the little city Parikia. The Friday hikes are the weekly escape. A mental break for sure, they are an opportunity to recreate with all of the other students, to talk with them, as well as spend some quality time with John Pack. More than that, the Pack hikes are a chance to see the island outside of the town, and experience all of her rugged, prickly, life-giving beauty. When I say prickly, I mean, wear pants, you never know when the Byzantine era donkey path will be overgrown with typically Parian spiked shrubbery. When I say life giving I mean a couple things. First, bring a backpack, people lived off of this land for 10,000+ years, we find any herb a salad could want, lemons, olives that are good to eat off the tree, carob, almonds, half of Whole Foods grows here. I also mean life giving in the sense that, for some reason, nobody comes back from a hike and plops down for a 6 hour nap. It’s energizing, the land has a vitality to it.

On one hike, which was particularly full of ruins, fruit, and history, John and Jane took us to the Healing Tree, which for me, represents everything that the Friday Hikes are. This tree is ancient, with huge branches that sag to the ground and others that stretch up 20 meters. It’s a perfect tree to climb, lounge under, sit on, I could entertain myself there for hours. It got its name from a particular student in the past. She was depressed, and knew it before coming. When she got to Paros she decided she couldn’t handle being here, that she needed to go home. John convinced her to wait out the week, which included a hike to this particular tree. She saw the branches, climbed right up, stayed there for hours, and announced that she would stay. Spending time in the tree was a healing exercise for her, and she swore by it. This is what the hikes can do. They can heal you. Not to sound all New Age medicine or anything, but being in nature every Friday, led by John, is good for the soul. The time out there will inspire you and affect your work. They are an ultimate good, and I swear by them.

Ironically, becoming comfortable as an independent individual was a byproduct of emptying myself. When I abandoned judgment– which filled my previous universe– and my old relationships, and my strongly rooted sense of American identity, I was left, at first, with only myself. And without those things what was I? In the beginning– it started on the train– I was lost, and at risk of fragmentation, as psychoanalysts say, as a result of the departure from my more comfortable universe and its contents. But feeling for the first time the anxiety of an impending state of fragmentation gave me underground wholeness. Emptying myself made room for a “Vita Nuova”; instead of wallowing in aloneness and chaos, I was inspired to embrace a new world and a new calling: to love instead of judge, to marvel instead of stress, to create (art!) instead of deconstruct. Returning to Rome after three weeks in Pistoia I felt as if I were seeing it for the first time. It was raw and ruinous. I noticed the rotting apartment buildings and the (colorful) tourists but wanted it just as it was. I marveled at the oscillating and polluted process of civilization, of art– its demise and miraculous resurfacing. After all, what would the Renaissance have been if not for the Dark Ages.

In short, the process of becoming empty and re-filling solidified my sense of self. Because, of course, by coming to Italy and Greece I did not leave or lose myself at all, but rather re-discovered it in the context of something different. Only then was I sure I had it at all. Being on the precipice of utter aloneness, I found that I am not solely a malleable product of my American culture, but an independent self with a free will and heart to internalize my ever-changing environment, no matter its unfamiliarity. With time, my self was gradually recognized and rebuilt within the unfamiliar constructs of the Aegean Center. And my new-found wholeness was nurtured, even sustained, by the loving relationships I developed, our creative pursuits and our unending quest to relish each other, our art, good food, and the beauty around us. Call it a personal renaissance, or an odyssey, or an extended meditation; whatever it was it gave me presence. It made me art.

As the threat of fragmentation again arises with only two weeks left in the semester, and the physical loss of these wonderful people and Greece is imminent at least for a time, I remind myself of what I have discovered: the competent Self seeks healthy, loving relationships for emotional nourishment but not completion or validation; she lives presently and thoughtfully and forgets familiarity; she embraces solitude; she allows perpetual emptying to fulfill and re-fill her. “Courage is the ability to open oneself to experience the unfamiliar”– I also read that on a tea bag. While this time I will be returning to the familiar, having courage – to find the unfamiliar in this known territory, to marvel at what I see and feel every day and to let that inflame my interests and my relationships – will keep me whole. Thanks for the train ride, John and friends (and Tazo tea).

Caroline Beaton is a painting student at the Aegean Center.

The week before the break I woke up in a rather unusual fashion. From my bed one can see my bathroom door. The previous day I had haphazardly thrown my towel over it. As I lay there unwilling to venture beyond my blanket I began to notice how pretty the towel was. The light shone through the bathroom window onto its peaks and valleys, and I began to pick out contour lines,  shadows. I leaned over and picked up my iphone to grab a picture. I was still unwilling to leave the safe spot that was my bed, and now when I look at the picture I wish I had been more diligent in this regard. None the less, I snapped it. As the morning progressed I began to laugh at myself and the clichéd nature of my situation. I really have begun to see my surroundings in a different way.

I think of myself as lucky in a number of ways. Prior to coming to the Aegean Center I had drawn periodically as a child, but as I ventured into my 20′s this had become somewhat sporadic, and in the few months prior to catching my flight to Italy it had become essentially non existent. As I moved into my career and my mid-twenties I began to pick up a camera in hopes of capturing the moments I did allow myself to see. I had coined the phrase with a friend of my mine from back home of wanting to capture the ‘click -click’ moments of life. Thus I had the urge to capture something more, but no longer confident in my ability to do so. I landed in Italy as a blank slate in a number of different ways.

In Pistoia I began drawing again, tentatively and with much frustration. We began with some basic drawing, which included learning about perspective. I recall sitting one afternoon in the villa drawing a line of boxes, and how at that moment it was so difficult. I had forgotten or grown lax in my approach, or had altogether no technique. I began filling in the blanks. The program was reminding me what I had previously learned and was also giving me a new approach in which to conquer my nerves. For example, one of my earliest memories of having a drawing lesson as a child was when I was seven. I was sitting at the kitchen table drawing a horse that appeared on one of my baby sister’s plush toys. Just as I do now, I was vocally sighing with my inability to gain the likeness. My mother approached me and said “Why don’t you draw everything but the horse?” While I now know she was talking about negative space, that had really been the last time anyone had given me direction in that regard. Up until now I didn’t even realize that this was how I approached a lot my drawing. In a number of ways I did know some things, but I still needed to  fill in the gaps.

Figure drawing has given us the approach on how to look at a figure; weight, constellations, boxes,  contour  lines. As I have progressed in the class I have begun to see what I saw previously in my drawing but without direction. For example, previously, when I had wanted to make something look less flat, I would draw in circles to give it body and shape. Figure drawing calls these contour lines. I have thus tried to amalgamate the two approaches ; trying not to draw the full circle, but still giving the body shape in this regard through my half circles. I kick myself a little because at certain points in the program I had stopped drawing, painting, or taking photos because of my own confidence and nerves. At points I was acknowledging what I did know, and thus had stopped. I remember when we were first introduced to contour lines at the villa and in my head I thought, ‘I think I do that’. The structure of painting and drawing has helped build that confidence again. It’s slowly filling in gaps, but also creating new ones while allowing me the ease to get going.

Digital photography, on the other hand, has allowed me to see things in a whole new light (pun intended). A couple of weeks ago, we moved from using the Bridge program to exclusively using Photoshop. For some reason I found this overwhelming. John poised the question in class asking “Who here feels overwhelmed yet?” I quickly lifted my hand only to have him say “You’re just nervous.” He was exactly right. On several occasions he reminded not only the class but me specifically that there was no test at the end of the program. Often John would say “Just play”. This drove me nuts at the beginning. I had worked in education previously and the Aegean’s approach to learning was what had attracted me to the center, but theory and practice don’t always jive at the beginning . Digital has taught me to keep going in other ways. It has encouraged me to take the photo, look at what I have taken and then try again. It’s teaching me to ask questions. It’s teaching me to see the world on my own, through my own eye, to learn from John’s trained eye, but to also portray the world as I may see it. It’s teaching me to again ask questions. Now, on the other side of the semester, I see the ‘structure’ of learning to learn.

Together, drawing, painting, and photography have helped me see bits and pieces of my ‘click-click’ moments in a different fashion. Because of painting and drawing, I see things such as saturation and tonal gradation which allow me to see my photography differently. Composing my photos, and the way I look at light, has had its effect on my drawing and painting as well. This past week I was sitting in a cafe and decided to do a quick sketch of my glass and table. In five minutes I rendered something that I found not too shabby. I then flipped back to one of the pictures I had painstakingly tried to compose at the villa in Pistoia. It had taken me three hours to draw a cup. Now I draw the contents of my table in less than five minutes. Not without mistakes, but definitely with less trepidation. Now that I play with it, I have questions, and I play more each day. Now, I wake up in the morning and look at a towel and notice how beautiful it is and reach for my camera.

“Excellence, literally, is the state in which something or someone can be said to excel. To excel is to surpass, to be superior, to outdo. In the arts, we have loads of poor and mediocre examples, and the excellent ones are superior to them. Okay, we’re done. I’ll take your questions.

Actually, hold on. I’d like to examine what happens when you look at an art object and perceive it to have excellence. Let’s say that an artist has made some beautiful thing. You look at it and say, Wow. You experience a pleasant feeling of joy or excitement. Your attention goes to it and lingers there. Also, “excellence,” as I said, implies superiority to other art objects. In the past you have looked at other objects and not perceived excellence in them. Now that you’re looking at this one, the pleasure you get out of it has an additional quality of surprise, perhaps even relief, that reminds you that you are looking at something unusual. You don’t recall the inferior objects, but the excellent one stands out in relation to them.

There’s a simple question you can ask about this experience. You see excellence in this art object that I’ve been talking about. Is it actually there in the art object, or have you just seen it there? In other words, is excellence some objective quality about the art object, or is it your subjective experience of the art object?

There are a lot of good reasons to say that it’s subjective. “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” said Hamlet to Rosencranz and Gildenstern. Subjectivity explains why taste varies. You like this work of art quite a lot, but your friend doesn’t. He prefers this other work of art over there. You think he’s crazy for preferring that one. You see excellence where he doesn’t, and vice-versa. This indicates that seeing excellence is a matter of opinion and individual experience. Those opinions and experiences aren’t facts about material objects. They’re opinions about what art is for and what makes it good.

But the idea of subjective excellence has some serious drawbacks. Although it can explain why your taste differs from your friend’s, it doesn’t explain why it might agree with the tastes of millions of other people. Millions of people love the art of Rembrandt. If there’s not something objectively excellent about Rembrandt, then you have to explain how millions of people concluded subjectively and individually that Rembrandt’s work was excellent.

One explanation you hear from the proponents of subjective excellence is that the consensus forms because people passively absorb the cultural values around them, and fall sway to marketing and propaganda. You think you have independent taste, but you’re really just acting out the presuppositions of your culture. Even the notion that you have independent taste is a presupposition of your culture. I have never been impressed with this idea because it’s basically a conspiracy theory. It’s not a conspiracy theory because it’s wrong—it may not be—but because it’s unfalsifiable, and because it favors a dramatic, convoluted explanation for the consensus over a simple one. The simple explanation is that quality exists in the object, objectively, and a lot of people—not everyone, but a lot of them—can see it.

Objective excellence also explains a phenomenon that I have never seen adequately discussed by art’s philosophers. During the modern Edo period, Japanese prints were so denigrated by the Japanese that they used them to wrap ceramics in preparation for sending them overseas. It’s only a little overstated to say that they looked at Utamaro about the same way we look at Styrofoam peanuts. This is how they were introduced to Europe, and how the French interest in them was sparked. Finally, Degas got a hold of them, and they thrilled him so much that he made works based on them that changed the course of Western painting.

This is easy to explain if there’s something objectively good about Utamaro, and impossible to explain if there isn’t. If the appreciation of Japanese prints depends on absorbing Japanese cultural values, Degas would not have been able to see any excellence in them, not only because he was French, but because even the Japanese at the time didn’t value them.

Proponents of subjective excellence would say that Degas appropriated the Japanese material in the same manner that European colonialists appropriated the resources of the colonies. But we’re not talking about sugar cane, which all humans can taste as sweet, but art, which—according to the people making that same argument about subjective excellence—is learned to be excellent from the surrounding culture. What’s more, it went in the other direction. The Japanese turned around and appropriated Art Nouveau. There are thousands of beautiful examples of Japanese Art Nouveau.

But again, there are problems with the idea of objective quality. The first one I already mentioned—just as subjective quality doesn’t explain the consensus, objective quality doesn’t explain differences of taste. At least, it doesn’t explain them very nicely. If something is objectively excellent, and you don’t see it, you’re failing to see a fact about the world. It is a kind of blindness, or maybe a kind of ignorance. At best it’s naivete.

That’s not such a drawback for the argument—the world often isn’t a nice place. The drawback is the notion that something could be a property of an object, but not a measurable one. We could say that a sculpture has mass, and weigh it. We could say that it has a color—blue, let’s say—and even if we disagreed about the nature of the color blue when it comes to vision or consciousness, we could take a spectrometer and measure the wavelength of the light reflecting off of it. What qualities can be said to properly belong to an object that we can’t measure? If the subjective explanation of consensus is a conspiracy theory, then the objective explanation of immeasurable properties is a kind of spiritualism. Excellence thus joins the company of things we believe to exist, and sometimes think we see, but can’t prove are there: deities, souls, aether. The former, we can’t prove to be false. The latter, we can’t prove to be true.”

Read the whole address here: http://www.einspruch.com/writing/2011/high-and-low-what-is-excellence-in-the-arts/

My junior year of high school, I realized that I needed to change. It began with the unnerving sense that I was following a trajectory of always looking forward to what comes next (next week, next assignment, next form of schooling) without being able to revel in my present moment. I was a student who would stay up working until 12:30 at night and then wake up at 5:00 the next morning to do more work for days on end. I loved school. I was hungry for the knowledge but the pressure I felt to succeed, to achieve, to excel beyond expectations was forcing me into a corner and my body couldn’t handle what I demanded of it. I was exhausted, getting sick all the time, and worst of all, time was whizzing by. At the rate I was going, I felt like I was racing for something, but I couldn’t say what it was.

I knew I had to take a gap year before college because I wanted so desperately to stop everything and look at life from a new angle. I wanted the time and space to immerse myself in my passions in totality and to strive to perfect them. To be surrounded by creativity that would inspire me to bring out my own. It feels somewhat surreal how perfect the Aegean Center is turning out to be for those needs.

Stepping into my new world, I found that the changes occurred naturally. I started writing in a word document on my computer called “My happiness project” multiple times a day and jotted down random thoughts, quotes, and sketches in journals. I vowed to stay off of Facebook and my quality of life swelled immediately. I gave some long and hard thought to the concept of generosity, and finally figured it out in full what I assumed I had known all my life; share everything and the world will be even more beautiful! I started listening to podcasts about energy healing and stopped wearing shoes most of the time. I’m not exaggerating… I found peace.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about all of this is how much work I am actually doing. Hours are spent in my painting studio, the music room practicing arias, vocal exercises and breath technique, in my apartment writing short stories or sitting somewhere outside, drawing for Jun’s Basic Drawing Class assignments. The difference is that it doesn’t feel like work. In fact, I dropped the phrase “getting work done” in my mind altogether, because now I know it’s not about being finished with something. Rather, it is about the moments that go into creation. When I stopped seeing the final result as being the objective, I learned to feel where I was, what I was doing, to feel my process, feel the present moment.

I stopped eating as fast as I could. Stopped editing my creative writing with the intention of pleasing any eyes but my own. Stopped scribbling down schedules for myself planned down to the minute. I slowed down. I started doing stretches and laughter yoga every day. Miraculously, I somehow had more than enough room in the day for what I wanted to do. Without Facebook or TV shows or texting, I found that I was incapable of wasting time. Whether my moments went into drawing in my sketchbook, cooking for my friends, sleeping, having a conversation with someone face to face, or standing silently and feeling myself breathe, I was living in a way that was healing and refreshing. I finally felt that I owned my actions and that I was doing everything for myself.

Early on, there was that inkling of dread in the back of my mind that said this was all too good to be true. Maybe I could live my months in bliss here, but ultimately I would go back home and feel once again swallowed by deadlines, checklists, and the saying my mother learned from her days of pastry chef school playing in my head to “move with a sense of urgency.” But as the days have unfurled and I keep getting happier and happier, less and less stressed, that sense of panic I felt looses its hold. To the questions that I have been asking myself from the moment I stepped into the Villa Rospigliosi in Pistoia: “Why can’t real life be like this? Why can’t creativity govern me all the time?” I suddenly dare to answer “It can.”

It’s hard to believe that three weeks have already come and gone here on Paros. Italy seems a distant memory as classes begin to unfold and the students settle into their work. Despite busy schedules, enthusiasm remains high both in and out of the classroom.

Each of us is here for a different reason, trying to figure out our own path in life. Though we are ultimately here for ourselves, a sense of family has formed among the students and, with that, an understanding and growing respect for one another.

For me, this term hasn’t gone at all what I had expected. I have been forced to look at myself in a new light, one that doesn’t allow me to shy away from the uncomfortable realities of my shortcomings and gifts. The importance of learning about the self is emphasized just as strongly as expanding academic knowledge and artistic skill, as well as the appreciation and understanding of nature and our surroundings. At times the island is just as much a teacher as the rest of the faculty, and its wisdom is revealed in different ways each week, particularly on the hikes. Being immersed in nature with no distractions other than Earth itself feeds the soul in a way nothing else can.

To continue John’s ongoing countdown, one more week of classes lies ahead before we enter break and the term quietly passes the halfway point. But for now all we can do is live in the moment – take in the light, embrace the weather, and continue working diligently.