THE ARTIST'S JOB.

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 446, 9 January 1948, Page 5

THE ARTIST'S JOB.

Sir,-Isobel Andrews wants to be able to "trace our artists’ inspiration from the New Zealand way of life and the New Zealand scene." If this means that an artist’s first job is to portray the way of life or the country in which he lives, I do not quite agree. Such activity has its place in an artist’s work, no doubt. But in my judgment the first job of the artist is to appeal ‘to those emotions in us which are universal. Constable was famous as portraying East Anglian scenes and Morland for English domestic scenes; but these pictures convey the scene only to those who know it personally or by study. Their pictures are great not so much because they portray England and its way of life, but bacause contemplating, them there is evoked in us emotions similar to those experienced by the artists when they sat down to give us within the four corners of the picture a come pact summary of tranquillity, luxuriant nature, and the mellow beauty of a settled countryside. Turner’s "Fighting Temaraire" appeals to us not because it depicts an old English battleship going to destruction, but because the artist has managed to produce something that causes the sentimental and romantic feeling in us to well up as we consider the once so powerful and great now going, as we all must irrevocably go, into decline and the discard; it is a poetic interpretation in colour of the common experience "How are the mighty fallen." In my judgment, art is always an essay in emotion and great art is great because it fixes for us for all time various aspects of our emotions and not because He it us geographical or social dee tails.

J. MALTON

MURRAY

(Oamaru)