Art
by Kenneth Barnes
Sunday Evening Assembly talk – July 9th
(Missed quite a lot of this)
I am going to say something that is really based on one or two things that I talked about to your parents yesterday. I think it is worth enlarging upon because it is so important. I talked about the very great importance of art in school, and I thought while we still have it round us and while we still have the memory of that very excellent musical concert in our minds I should talk about it. Art has always played an important part in the school, and anyone who fails to understand what art means to the school fails to understand what the school is built upon and what the school seeks to do. I pointed out to parents that when visitors come, and especially people who know a great deal about education – people like the inspectors – the first thing they want to see is the art in the school. That is an indication that not only do we think it important, but that people who are watching the development of the school from the outside think it important too. It used to be thought useless: why are people turning to it? There are people who, perhaps among you, say “What is the use of it? What is the use of putting lines on paper? What is the use of music? What is the use of trying to understand? You ask how much will it be worth to you in pounds, shillings and pence – you wonder how it will add to your income when you grow up.
If you try to assess anything in the school from this point of view, you will find there is precious little in the school that will help you obtain money. In fact, the best people at earning money are the people who forget what they learn at school. Here there are so many things that lead us away from thinking about making a fortune. [Here a marginal note is inserted reading “Enlarge considerably”] But even so, there must be many of you who know that art has entered a great deal into life of a country during relatively recent years, and people’s standards of it have gone up sufficiently for many more artists to be in demand. So though it might be difficult for an artist to think of earning money instead of painting the pictures he wants to do, there is no doubt that he will be more and more wanted as we did not give the artist a chance. Therefore, though we may not turn our minds much to the money earning side of it, there is no doubt in the world of the future that it is going to be ………… [Here a marginal note is made reading “Not sure this paragraph is relevant – a side track – Art is not always beauty.”] Many of you, when you have been through this school, when you buy things for your home, will want something that is not only worth using but worth looking at and worth being proud of. Something whose meaning is a continual challenge?
I would point out that there is a connection between beauty and efficiency. There are many of you who are concerned with how things work and how to make things work better. – how to work ships, engines, more smoothly, more satisfactorily – and possibly some of you have begun to discover that there is some connection between that smooth satisfactory work and what other people call beauty. There is no doubt at all that when a man sets out to build a new plane or a ship, he wants to build it so that people will gasp exclaim in admiration at the sweep of its lines. He doesn’t just sit down with a whole lot of mathematical tables but with feelings, and he is striving to find something that will satisfy him in more than just mechanical terms.
Possibly some of you have not thought much about what we call the artistic side of life, but it is present all the time whether we like it or not. All the time you are being an artist – either a good or a bad one – for instance, if you are playing golf. You know the difference between an ugly shot and a beautiful one, and you know the beautiful one is the efficient one and the ugly one is the one that makes a mess of the turf. Or take cricket. When you are watching cricket you may say “Good heavens – what a beautiful shot”. Exactly the same, of course, is true of tennis. The beautiful shot is always the efficient one. I discovered that when I was trying to row. I used to row as if I was trying to pull the Thames past me instead of pulling the boat through the Thames. I lost my position in the boat. When I saw the Cambridge boat coming down the river, I was [s]truck by the sight of their bodies moving in such perfect time and harmony. That is true of all the things you do – movements that are most economical of energy – that do the job best – they have sweep and satisfaction of that sort in them. But an artist does not always make his work out of things that have simple movements in them. The artist is always trying to get himself in a ….., and to put himself on to canvas or into music. The artist may capture the atmosphere of a factory, but he is still the artist when he does that. [Here is inserted a marginal note reading “Enlarge considerably”]
When you see Winston’s [A reference to a pupil at the time] aeroplane mount up and come down slowly in a spiral to earth and make a good landing, don’t you get a feeling about it? It is a feeling you can’t put into words or into any rational sort of statement – that difference between smooth running and bad running. If you are feeling in that way, you are feeling as an artist. And you know that when we try to put these things into words they don’t really mean to you what the experience has meant. [this paragraph from the beginning to this point is crossed through and a marginal note reading “Too abrupt” appears] You are an artist when you are trying to correct bad behaviour in your group. You may be talking in a gracious way or in an ungracious way. You are being an artist – perhaps a bad one if you are creating a rumpus. Because your whole self is there as well as just your method.
You may say that this is all very well, but “why should we do art in the school – why should we have to come to the art room?” – Let me try to explain it, not by graphic art but by the art of using words. The difference between using words in one way and using them in another way. When you have a few words in which to describe things you say you are a poor artist and suffer as a result. Many young people suffer like this. A young man, getting a wonderful glimpse of his girl friend will simply tell her she looks ‘smashing’. He is probably too shy to say she is charming and delightful. It may be that he has never learned to use those words – never thought that such words could be used to describe someone. There are millions of people who go on using words in that unartistic way. (The more you try to use the right ones the more you develop your capacity to feel.) If you use words in a clumsy and inappropriate way, you will find your thoughts are clumsy too. The more words you use, the more feelings you will discover you have got. That is why the poet discovers so much more about life than does the ordinary man. He tries to find words to express the depth of feeling he has at the moment. A great deal of your experience is through your eyes – in fact most of most people’s experience is through their eyes, and they think of images and not words. They don’t think it out logically from sentence to sentence and idea to idea. For that reason graphic art has always been very important to mankind. If we go back as far as we can in history we find that primitive man expressed himself, if not on paper, then in rock. These pictures are not accurate reproductions of something that happened, but pictures that conveys the artist’s mood and feeling about his life. They are not photographic, but something that takes you back and make you feel as you would have felt in those days. And when you draw in the art room you may feel terribly empty to begin with, but when you try to capture a mood and put it on to paper you will feel something that man has always tried to do, and when you feel disgusted with your efforts you are feeling what every artist has felt – the feeling that he has so much more in him than his brush can express. The best artist always feels like that. [This paragraph has been scrawled through with a single line and a marginal not has been written reading “A whole paragraph on this…..a whole talk! In the beginning was the word.”]
When you look round this room and you see imaginative pictures, pictures of things that never have happened, don’t say they are silly. They are things that represent something that is passing through the mind and spirit of the person concerned. They are expressions of the sort of mystery that lies at the bottom of human life. An artist can bring up feelings from the depth of his mind and express them in a way that other people cannot perhaps understand. If a person tries to understand art without ever doing any himself he is very limited, and if you never create anything then you won’t get the feeling of it. Putting your ideas on to paper will help you understand the aims of the artist – to make his world open up to him. And it is up to us to try and find out about other people and what their feelings are. If we shut out the feelings of other people we are shutting out something very important. If we shut out love it is like losing an eye – you are destroying half of life. If you understand a bit of the life of the artist and the strange mystery that he is trying to express you will understand more about …. of the courageous person to life. The courageous person realises that there is a great deal in life that cannot be put into statements – things that can only be understood in the way the artist and the poet understand them. This is why religion ………….
(End missed)
[Note jotted at end – “The fear of feeling. Can only by overcome by an act of courage”]
Archive reference: PP KCB 3/7/2 document 12
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