Hi, Ian Roberts and Mastering Composition. So when I film this today, it's May 14th.
Tomorrow I'm leaving for an eight day, I'll be gone for about 12 or 13 days, but an eight
day river rafting trip down the Grand Canyon with a group of plein air painters. We're going to be
painting morning and evening all the way down. By the time you, this video is available May 25th,
it'll actually be the day I'm coming off the river and so the following week I'm going to do a show
and tell of the paintings i did on that trip. So we're going to do something a
little bit different this week. I'm, I've been interested in the idea of beauty
for a long time and I did a series of videos a few years ago on it looking at a
few core words like art, revelation, form in terms of understanding beauty and I
find the roots of words where they come from, their real meaning, original meaning, really
fascinating so I thought I'd share one of those videos this week with you. It's about five
minutes long and look at the word 'muse', 'the muse'. I do equate a lot of my
understanding of beauty as a spiritual experience so you'll see that as I'm describing
it so I hope you find the ideas engaging and stimulating and I'll
see you at the end - bye for now. After I finished the video, I remembered this
quote that I just thought would be so relevant to the whole video. "A person's work is nothing but
the slow track to rediscover through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images
in whose presence their heart first opened." It's kind of fascinating that idea of those two,
three images and their connection to the muse. So I want to look at beauty in terms of its
objective quality, its subjective quality and then I want to look at the roots of a few words. It's
art, beauty, form, ugly, perception and revelation and look at them and reanimate those words
from the ashes of their burnt out meaning. So let's look at the word 'muse'. We get the
word music from that and museum - the temple to the muse. Now back in the 80s, I had this
idea, I had this large studio and I was making large abstract paintings and I had this idea come
to me to make a boat and it would be about that big around on about 20 feet long of polished
cedar strip. I thought of it as the vessel for the mystic journey. The only thing about it
is that you know an artist has two process two, two aspects we could say - the process of making
it and then the product. A carpenter can build a table and after two weeks even if they don't like
the craftsmanship, at least they have a table. An artist can spend two weeks or two months or two
years on something in a process and have nothing. So I was looking at the complexity of building
this thing, the amount of time, the tools and I just thought you know it's just too much process
I didn't know if I'd even get the product and so I didn't do it. Then about 10 years later, the
idea came back to me and it came back five years after that and it keeps coming back until last
year it came back again and I had to ask myself, "well am I gonna die having never done this or am
I gonna do it?" and so last year I built one - or more accurately, a model 60 inches and you can
see it, you can see the structure and I came out every day and I was polishing and I was honing
and I was cutting. I loved making it, it was great and I didn't cover it because i thought at
that scale covering it might interfere with the form. I like the skeletal quality of
it and I think I might make a larger one but to the point of the muse - where
did that idea come from? I felt like Noah a little bit although at least Noah is
building something practical, if improbable. I mean why? And the point is, artists
don't usually know. The art critic takes biographical details and creates this
structure of a reason why the artist creates this or that. The artist has no idea where the
ideas are coming from and you listen to those headsets in museums, the audio guides telling you
biographical details really all they're doing is distracting you from the ability to be quietly
in tune and connecting with the art itself. So the muse of the nine daughters of Mnemosyne and
she had the nine daughters with Zeus and each one of those daughters is responsible for an avenue of
human expression like dance, music, poetry, epics. None for painting and sculpture, which I've
always found, you know, I've always had a little bit of an issue with. Now Mnemosyne has
a lake in Hades and when you die, you come into Hades wrapped and tight with all the ambitions
and problems and confusion and pain and hate and everything else of your life, everything passing
through your senses and you drink from that lake and you break the boundaries of that experience
and remember again your pure unbounded potential. Now that creates a very interesting
idea of what the muse are doing. It's as if the muse are connecting us, the
human and the divine, while we're still here giving us impulses of remembrance
of our full unbounded potential so that we can experience it here in the far
sort of denser, more confusing world we live in. The word 'muse' comes from an Indo-European
root -men meaning to remember and great art allows us to remember, to reconnect to those deep
divine cores of our existence and be familiar with them again through these works of art. In
a sense, I look at that as like the foundation for the search for beauty. If we're going to
look at beauty, let's look at the word ugly too. It comes from an old Norse word meaning 'dread'.
You think dread of what? But really, it's dread of remembering our unbounded potential. We're
terrified of it and we anesthetize ourselves. Anesthetize means to deaden ourselves to beauty -
that's its root. We do that with worry, with fear, with going shopping, with substance abuse and with
overwork. We're terrified to look at ourselves. We wear masks to present to public and even
more insidious, we have masks we present even to ourself. We identify so thoroughly with
our ambitions and our grievances and our hurts. The word 'fear' actually comes from a root meaning
to test or to try. Our response to the word now is we remove ourselves from fear but in fact,
originally, it was the opposite. We move into it, we move towards fear, we test the limits of what
we can face. You know it's like that story of, uh, the hero's journey - the young boy, the young
girl in the village wanting to go out to face the ogre and everyone's saying "no, no don't go beyond
the village gate" but he goes or she goes hoping not to become a pile of bones at the bottom of
a swamp and in fact the ogre doesn't kill them but gives them a boon. They face their fear and
gives them a boon to take back to the village. The word 'sublime' means to come up
against the limit. The limit of those boundaries of what we think we are. It's like
the aesthetics of fear. We experience it like in a thunderstorm with the lightning and
the thunder. We feel so small, it cracks open this tiny perception we have of
ourself to reveal that vast interior. That's our potential and that's what fear exposes
us to and we open to that and we become revealed. So as always, I hope you found that engaging. If
you would like to see any of those other videos, you can go to my website ianroberts.com
and right along the top it says "The Search for Beauty" which is a blog
and in there you can see the video series and there's about seven of them,
I think. So I will see you next week with paintings from my Grand Canyon rafting trip.
So until then, bye for now and all the best.
