The Denver Art Museum had a show some years ago featuring 70 paintings by Frederick Remington. The paintings were particularly interesting in that they were all nocturnes. They were paintings that were “lighted” by the moon, campfires, lanterns or the starry night. It seems that when Remington first tried to capture the color of night, he couldn’t do it and was very frustrated.
But he persisted. He had to transcend the tradition of what artists “thought” the color of night would be. He had to look deeply past his conditioning and actually “see” what the color of night was. We invite you to look at a Remington nocturnal painting to see what he discovered.
Similarly in The Simple Reality Project, we found describing the “color” of reality challenging at the beginning of the project, but continue to be committed to the process of learning to “see” the truth. Perhaps we can discover the color of words.
Pursuing the truth in the world of art requires a willingness to be peripatetic. Historically and geographically the centers of the art world in the “West” moved from Athens to Rome to Constantinople to Northumbria to Aachen to Florence to Rome to Paris and to New York (1950) where it remains today.
Or is there really a “center of the art world” anymore? Historically, it’s almost as if beauty itself had been searching for something when art flourished in these various locales. Or maybe it’s more like what Robert Hughes has described when he wrote that “art nourishes itself from other art and how, with enough conviction, art can form its own republic of pleasure, a parenthesis within the real world—a paradise.”[i]
Or perhaps art is not searching for a friendly, supportive environment to express beauty; perhaps art is trying to show humanity that paradise is everywhere and NOW. If so, let us enter without hesitation the world of truth and beauty, the world of Paradigm-A.
[i] Hughes, Robert. The Shock of the New. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1981, page 139.
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Find a much more in-depth discussion in books by Roy Charles Henry.
