 3
1) When we place the mastercraftsmen
who have preceded us upon a pedestal, we forget that we too have the same
potential and therefore do not strive.(1)
2) When we place too high
of a value on the objects of art collectors begin to horde them for investment
value, museums begin to protect them for their monetary value and start
to seem like bank vaults. Like this, art loses its real value.
3) Therefore, the mastercraftsman
advocates the value of striving with humility and simplicity, (2) The value
of working at one's craft without greedy ambition, and the value of avoiding
the trap of trying to cleverly follow the fashionable.
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 footnotes
1) Whoever the master is whom you prefer, this must only
be a directive for you. Otherwise you will never be anything but an imitator.
With any feeling for nature whatever, and some fortunate gifts - and you
have some - you should be able to dissociate yourself; advice, the methods
of another, must not make you change your own manner of feeling. Should
you at the moment be under the influence of one who is older than you,
believe me as soon as you begin to feel yourself, your own emotions will
finally emerge and conquer their place in the sun - get the upper hand
- confidence...
Paul Cezanne, from a letter to Charles
Camoin, 1904
Your desire to find a moral, an intellectual point of support
in the works[of the old Venetian masters], which assuredly we shall never
surpass, make you continually on the qui vive, searching incessantly for
the way, [which ] you dimly apprehend, [that] will lead you surely to the
recognition in front of nature of what your means of expression are; and
the day you will have found them, be convinced that you will find also
without effort and in front of nature the means to employed by the four
or five great ones of Venice.... During this period [of experimentation]
we turn towards the admirable works that have been handed down to us through-out
the ages, where we find comfort, a support such as a plank is for a bather.
Paul Cezanne, from a letter to Emile
Bernard, 1905
2) “A certain pride in the conception of a work and extreme
humility in its realization. Extreme pride and extreme humility. But both
an extreme pride in conceiving it and an extreme humility in realizing
it are necessary.”
Joan Miro, letter to S. Gasch, Montroig,
Aug. 16, 1928
Humility collects the soul into a single point by the power
of silence. A truly humble man has no desire to be known or admired by
others, but wishes to plunge from himself into himself, to become nothing,
as if he had never been born. When he is completely hidden to himself in
himself, he is completely with God.
Isaac of Nineveh (6th Century)
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