Birge Harrison: On Beauty

"Hazy Moonlight" by Birge Harrison

"Birge Harrison is catholic in regard to the selection of subjects for his brush. In this he appears to be governed solely by the one word 'beauty,' and all that word imports and implies. In his own book on landscape painting he has stated his creed upon this matter so admirably that I cannot do better than to quote his own words: 

'Nature,' he says, 'is not all beautiful by any means, but why should we choose to perpetuate her ugly side? I believe it to be one of the artists' chief functions, as it should be his chief delight, to watch for the rare mood when she wafts aside the veil of the commonplace and shows us her inner soul in some bewildering vision of poetic beauty...'

In this it will be seen that he is at odds with that large group of artists whose slogan is 'Art for Art's sake.' And in this connection he goes on to say:

'When I was a student in Paris away back in the seventies, a group of young artists who were at that time making some stir in the art world asserted, with a great deal of unnecessary noise and bluster, that good painting could glorify the most revolting subject; the subject was nothing, the craftsmanship everything. I remember that I was temporarily caught up in the swirl of the movement and that, for a time, I ran with the shouting iconoclasts. The memory of this makes me still lenient with any youngster who raises the old cry, false as it is. It is a phase, one of the growing pains of adolescence, which is normal and to be expected...'"

He encourages the artist to foster his sense of beauty in the chapter on "Vision" in his book:

"By the grace of God many of us are born with the sense of beauty; and even if we are gifted with but a tiny spark, this spark can be fostered until it grows into a clear and luminous flame whose light will transform the most commonplace scene or object into a vision of infinite loveliness. If we look always for beauty we shall come at last to find it in the most unexpected places and under many strange garbs. But true vision means not only the power to see and to recognize beauty, but the power to see it stripped of all vulgarities and inessentials; the power to see the soul of the thing and to grasp its essential beauty.

For any landscape has a soul as well as a body. Its body is our great rock-ribbed mother earth with her endless expanses of fields and hills, of rivers and surging seas. Its soul is the spirit of light - of sunlight, of moonlight, of starlight - which plays ceaselessly across the face of the landscape, veiling it at night in mystery and shadow, painting it at dawn with the colors of the pearlshell, and bathing it a midday in a luminous glory. He who paints the body alone may be an excellent craftsman, but the true artist is he who paints the beautiful body informed and irradiated by the still more lovely and fascinating spirit - he who renders the mood."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Birge Harrison: Poet Painter" by Charles Louis Borgmeyer and "Landscape Painting" by Birge Harrison.)