35 1a)Dissolve into the Universal Harmony while working and your work will be a benediction to all who witness it.
2a) The people may be attracted
to intense color, loud sounds or shocking movements.
2b) Yet great masterworks
that are the products of the Universal Harmony do not depend on pure attraction
.
2c) They are much more
subtle and mysterious.
2d) The power within such
art is not obvious enough to be immediately noticed.
3a)Those things which
are great in the arts don't reveal all their secrets in the first
experience of them.
3b) This is what gives them
the ability to endure.
footnotes
[1] ”The present painter is concerned not with his own feelings or with the mystery of his own personality but with the penetration into the world mystery. His imagination is therefore attempting to dig into metaphysical secrets. To that extent his art is concerned with the sublime. It is a religious art which through symbols will catch the basic truth of life.
...The artist trys to wrest truth from the void.”
Quoted in Thomas
B. Hess, Barnet Newman, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971)
[2] For me a work must
first have a vitality of its own. I do not mean a reflection of the vitality
of life, of movement, physical action, frisking, dancing figures, and so
on, but that a work can have in it a pent-up energy, an intense life of
its own, independent of the object it may represent. When a work has this
powerful vitality we do not connect the word Beauty with it...
Between beauty of expression and power of expression there is a difference of function. The first aims at pleasing the senses, the second has a spiritual vitality which for me is moving and goes deeper than the senses.
Because a work does not aim at reproducing natural appearances it is not, therefore, an escape from life -- but may be a penetration into reality, not a sedative or drug, not just the exercise in a pleasing combination, not a decoration to life, but an expression of the significance of life, a stimulation to greater effort in living. Henry Moore, The Sculptor’s Aim