Friday, June 19, 2015

The Beggar's Daughter, parts 4736 - 4739


 4736.  No drawing, no matter how skilled can ever compare to that drawing driven by the need of the artist to express desire for the subject depicted. This raises a difficult question to answer, what of those masterworks that depict some ugliness that the artist loathed. Are those not great works as well?


 4737. I am not going to attempt to answer that kind of question because it leads into a meaningless quagmire, a labyrinth useless to investigate.  One runs into the same problem with that strange line, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all we know on earth, and all we need to know," that puzzling line by John Keats.


 4738. But the line is not so strange, if you recall that it is not Keats talking to you, it is the sculptured lover on the vase, talking to his fleeing beloved. Their world was the vase on which they existed, and in that world, "Beauty was truth and truth was beauty." Until, alas, the vase falls off the shelf. Then, what is to be done? Go for the broom, or search for some glue.


 4739. So it was with the unknown artist's drawings. The drawing is greater that any other, because at the time it was drawn, nothing else existed in the world but the lover and the beloved. That was the kind of drawings I found in that abandoned sketchbook.

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