Today we live in an ugly moment in our human experience in which beauty of artform has disappeared. There are many causes for this, political, anti-religious, lack of education, learning, training, and practice.
One does not matriculate into American universities these days to discover anything about beauty much less to learn how to achieve creating that which might be uplifting to the SOUL. “The blind cannot lead the blind”, or “You can’t milk a turnip”, they used to say on the farm…..but no one farms anymore.
One needs a SOUL to be able to be moved by beauty. Who has time to develop any SOUL these days? Who would be a teacher in schools and universities these days where they manufacture graduates without SOULS?
Universities are killers of beauty in any form. They also dictate that the human animal has no SOUL, resulting in the products they produce.
I was fortunate in my own life’s story to have lived in a different moment…..a time when creating beauty, like accumulating knowledge, was essential, we were told, for us humans be become closer to God.
Our world certainly has changed, hasn’t it!
BEAUTY INSPIRES ONES SOUL. Soul craves for more beauty. Without SOUL beauty becomes unseen, unfelt, reduced to the nonexistent, lost in displays without reverence, and therefore unproduced as is its condition in America today.
I was raised in a different, more earth-oriented America whose soulful teachers made me listen to Beethoven, Mozart, Handel, Bach, Verdi, read and memorize uplifting poetry, and such, and be silent when entering magnificent grounds…..as if entering paradise, the Kingdom of God.
Great art, visual or aural, causes God to massage ones soul. In verbage it’s the difference between the following statements regarding human DEATH: “Man eventually croaks.”……compared to: “As for Man, his days are as grass. As the Lily of the field so he flourisheth. And the wind passeth over it and it is gone. And the place, thereof, shall know it no more.”
Creating art beyond the mundane, one needs to be sufficiently inspired to discover why something is more beautiful than something else, and then attempt to create that something. Beethoven’s paralyzing gifts of beauties came from “tricks of the trade”, thoughts, memories, views, moods, tempers, put from mind into sounds rich for the ear to absorb and remember ’til the last syllable of recorded time’….(a quote from Shakespeare). Discovering great art is a drug, without doubt…..for one craves for more, ever more, for once inspired, one seeks more inspiration, without ever realizing the drive for it and the down without it.
What are the “tricks of the trade” we at Masterpiece used to develop “Another Masterpiece in St. Paul”, an attractive setting according to the photo? If you find it attracting, why? What makes it so? What was our purpose? What did we use as “paint” to create this picture? What could be done to improve your landscape picture?….to inspire you, the homeowner or business owner?
Landscape Gardening is a visual art form, the most cherished of all of the arts for nearly every human culture known views paradise as a Garden. Remember always, ‘Gardens, like people, gain character with age.”