Last summer I learned a great deal about Robert Henri while researching for the mural at the museum in Cozad. During my process I sought a definition of the Art Spirit, looking for a short and sweet summary that I could add to my toolbox. Henri wasn’t letting go of his secrets that easily. The deeper that I dug, the more I became aware that I was looking for a formula to crack the code so that I could finally be really ‘good’. The book was enigmatic. I began to obsess. “What IS the Art Spirit? What does it mean, how can I use it?” Henri said,
“ Intellectuality steps in and, as the song within us is of the utmost sensitiveness, it retires in the presence of the cold material intellect.”
“I have heard it often said that the artist does not need intellect, his is the province of the soul”.
How else could I find the Art Spirit if it wasn’t through studying and applying concepts and theories? I was trying too hard and hitting my head against the wall. It was frustrating.
Around this time I had fallen down (yet another!) rabbit hole about avian species’ ability to see colors. I’m taking you down this hole with me, so hold on. Humans have trichromatic vision, meaning that we have three kinds of color-sensitive cells in our eyes (for red, green, and blue light). Many birds are tetrachromatic, which means they have four kinds of cells. The fourth kind allows them to see UV light, which we can’t see. They can perceive colors and patterns that we can’t. The reason that I bring this up is because, when I don’t know something that I want to be glaringly obvious, I want to GROW that 4th type of cell to be able to find it. It is me running up against my own limitations. This is what was happening by trying to intellectually understand the Art Spirit. To stretch outside of my knowledge to comprehend something that I simply couldn’t. Reading words in a book and trying to plug them into my frame of knowledge felt flat and monochromatic. The words weren’t enough. I continued to study Henri’s color theory, re-read the Art Spirit and take it in the only way that I knew how to- methodically, formulaically. I found no enlightenment. As far as I was concerned, I was living in a monochromatic world. After some time, I began to realize that in order to understand this concept what I needed to do was to UNlearn my preconceptions. Henri’s wisdom helped to lead me to this. “Try to see the terms of the reality, and not the terms of the surface. A child sees the reality beyond surface or fact, but later in an art school he is taught to see the lines on the surface. Get over this thing of copying the surface. You must not see your subject, but through it.” I was beginning to understand that I was getting in my own way, and no amount of intellectualizing would help me to find something that was of a spiritual nature, something that lived below the surface.
At the end of the summer the mural was finished, but But my quest for the Art Spirit had just begun.