Selections from American painter Robert Henri's The Art Spirit; a collection of self-reflections and remarks on a life of art-making. While intuitive technique on painting and theory are sputtered throughout, there are often wild-cards of essential wisdom that go beyond just the artist's opinions.
"Events and upheavals, which seem more profound than they really are, are happening on the surface.
But there is another and deeper change in progress, It is of long, steady persistent growth, very little affected and not at all disturbed by surface conditions.
The artist of today should be alive to this deeper evolution on which all growth depends, has depended and will depend." p.94
"All manifestations of art are but landmarks in the progress of the human spirit toward a thing but as yet sensed and far from being possessed." 66.
"Art is the inevitable consequence of growth and is the manifestation of the principles of its origin." 67.
Henri, Robert. The Art Spirit. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1923, 1984.
These quotes gnaw at the bones of what it means to exist in a world that is continuously changing. It is hopeless to keep up or fight the current of events, but to accept the speed and rapids and keep focus on the journey and the surroundings.
Robert Henri has found an underlying strive for an unnamed thing, the just-out-of-reach goal that drives all living beings to exist, and drives man to create and build from what he has learned. Henri sees the growth that comes out of life as the source of things to come and not yet realized, the very manifestations that are the natural order of growth are what drives man to continue and ask questions he does not have answers to.
Two day time lapse diptych, Blossoms, 2017. Digital photographs.