The Sage Forge

I learned much more teaching than I learned learning. One reason for that was that my students at the Barnwell Garden and Art Center were, for the most part, twice my age and more. I "taught" people like Charles Ravenna, my daddy's high school vice principal and Hank Stoer, the pathologist for whom my mama had worked in her twenties as a cytotechnologist for the city's charity hospital. Dr. Stoer went on to become a regionally known artist, and deservedly so. People like these and others kept me well challenged. They were the embodiment of Daddy's wise words to me.

 "You have to know ten times as much to teach as you have to know to do."

"It is the hardest thing I have ever done." was my answer. That was the best I could do at the moment. At least the kernel of the truth was in there. I had already long since decided that the manner in which I had been taught art functioned in a human mind was so much pseudo-religious nonsense. Art did, and does, something for me.  It is more than that, though.  It does something for both individuals and societies. It has a power to change the very fiber of our being.

What I knew then was that no extended human society has ever existed that did not create art. I also knew that when the creativity expressed in that art falls from its apex it virtually always presages the collapse of a civilization. Art had crept into my mind as a kind of intellectual puzzle. I kept doing art, never feeling particularly brilliant as an artist, because the flame of that puzzle was irresistible.

Consider this. While there were landscape artists before the founding of the United States landscapes had always had to be validated by a human presence of some sort. The very fact that the greatest European tradition of landscape paintings was in the Netherlands proves the point. There the land was literally wrested from the sea by human effort. The human effort involved in the very presence of the land made the landscape worthy of consideration as a subject for art.

At that time wilderness was something inherently sinister. When the early Spanish explorers first encountered the Grand Canyon in the 17th century they saw it only as an impassable devastation, a wasteland.

Early in the life of this country that changed. A school, or tradition, of artists grew up around a reverence for nature probably influenced by our contact with American Indians. These artists, expressing a uniquely American viewpoint, influenced the way the people of the whole world saw nature.

By the time John Wesley Powell made his explorations of the Grand Canyon in 1869 and again in 1870 people were able to perceive in that wildest of places an almost holy majesty. Photographs of the second expedition and Thomas Moran's early paintings of the West were a worldwide sensation. They helped to define us both to the world and to ourselves as a nation.

This kind of transformation is not unique to landscape. From the plainsong architectural chant of the Taos Pueblo to the geometric sorcery of the Brooklyn Bridge over and over the impact of things we would normally see as emotionally blank are given a kind of life through art. Images of desert vegetation mean something to us as Americans. Log cabins mean something to us as Americans. The meanings of these things are interconnected with our sense of self and our place in the larger world. Starting with people like Thomas Cole and Asher Durand sending their paintings of the Hudson River Valley back to the civilized folk of New York City art did that to us. They painted a picture inside us of being American. We became that picture.

Day by day art is transforming our image of who we are and how we are connected to one another. We in Huntsville Texas, for example, can embrace the power of art to influence both how we see ourselves and how we are seen by others. Or we can leave that power to the sometimes less than sympathetic folks of the outside world. We only have to choose whether we want to define ourselves or be defined.

Does this seem "pie in the sky" to you? Taos was nothing before artists taught Americans to value it as beautiful. Woods Hole was the same. People now spend huge prices to buy, and preserve the ambiance of, land that once could have been purchased for pennies an acre. Closer to my home, thirty years ago Houston's now-fashionable Rice Village was drifting toward slum status. Artists and crafts people transformed the area, made it a destination, and now can't afford the rent.

Today I would answer my student's question differently. Artists have it within their grasp to be powerful in ways that can change whole nations from the inside out. They do so by teaching people to see and identify with beauty in places they had not seen it before. Artists can be masters of the vision that tells us who we are. We need not be prisoners of the limited visions of others.

If you live in a place like the one in which I live that should hit pretty close to home.

Lee Jamison can be reached for comment at lee@leejamison.com .