Art is the Priceless Expression of the Soul

What is the fine line that separates art from pornography? Can you feel it? Sense it? What is vulgar to one person may be beautiful to another. I was surprised and excited when I took my first class drawing with a live model. I blossomed! My linear ink/brush drawing won first prize in an art show.

I took my sketches and drawings; my prized paintings, to a family reunion and shared them with relatives. My excitement waned as shocked and appalled faces looked back at me. They were not only “not impressed,” they were disgusted.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Obviously, my relatives had never had much exposure to art. What they saw and felt was shame for the exposure of the human form. I was crestfallen. Every emotion and skill I had discovered in myself was frowned on by those who knew me. My best was not good enough. I was viewed with disdain.

Did that deter me? Yes, for awhile until I rediscovered myself and the beauty of all God’s creations, including the human body.

During the transformation of the German people under the leadership of Hitler, Heinrich Heine made this observation: “Where books or art is burned, they will in the end, burn people.”

We must protect our freedom of expression. In China they cannot use the internet freely or speak freely. Sometimes in government’s efforts to control and protect, they end up extinguishing freedom. Just like blowing on a lighted candle, they diminish the light of truth and the power of the individual to choose.

Here are some of my favorite quotes by famous artists: Enjoy!

"When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college- that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?" Howard Ikemoto

"The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract." Paul Klee

"Good art is not what it looks like, but what it does to us." Roy Adzak

"A painting is never finished - it simply stops in interesting places." Paul Gardner

"A line is a dot that went for a walk." Paul Klee

"It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child." Pablo Picasso

"Art washes from the soul the dust of everyday life." Pablo Picasso

"It takes a very long time to become young." Pablo Picasso

"There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun." Pablo Picasso

"Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures." Henry Ward Beecher

"It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else." Henri Matisse

"I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way-things I had no words for." Georgia O'Keeffe

"Art is not what you see, but what you make others see." Georgia O'Keeffe

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