Henry James once wrote:
Mr. (Winslow) Homer . . . cares not a jot for such fantastic hairsplitting as the distinction between beauty and ugliness. . . .to see, and to reproduce what he sees, is his only care. . . . He not only has no imagination, but he contrives to elevate this rather blighting negative into a blooming and honorable postive. He is almost barbarously simple, and to our eye, he is horribly ugly. . . . He has chosen the least pictorial features of the least pictorial range of scenery and civilization; he has resolutely treated them as if they were pictorial, as if they were every inch as good as Capri or Tangiers; and to reward his audacity, he has incontestably succeeded.
A Lecture by Gene Hargrove
~I've found that the awareness I'll never be able to enjoy, except at great cost, the spectacular locales the people on tv and in the movies so effortlessly visit has contributed to my affection for places I don't have to go in debt to see. That and a growing misanthropy has changed my ideas about what makes nature beautiful.
Posted by Stubbornson at April 28, 2006 06:37 AM