artbycassiday Newletter Vol. 1 #3 July 2004 "Line v. Form"

Dear friends, supporters, patrons, and art lovers everywhere:


After four months of my experiment in life, this Bohemian odyssey, this on-going tight-wire act on the precipice of creativity, I'd like to take a few moments of your time for serious discussion of an elemental artistic debate spanning the centuries. From Aristotle and Socrates to Thesophides' great treatise on line, to the "colony de artiste" at Sicily, to Dominicus' long lost letters to the "Brotherhood of Form" --a secret society that only recently has been re-discovered after being discovered in the fifth century by Boethius de lal Giotto and subsequently thought lost when the great library at Antiochus burned to the ground in 756 AD. And then later determined to have not perished in the great fire, but secretly smuggled by the artloving footboy to the Knight of the Piero della Francesca and secreted to be uncovered in an attic in Point de Arms, Connecticut in 1973 when the Antique Road Show passed through the village. It's an interesting story which includes heretofore unknown voyages of the Piero de la Velasquez de las Espanol and the development of the Mayflower Compact as well as interstices regarding significant battles of the American Revolution.

More on that later.


From Bacon to Whitehead to Yeats to Blumkin the argument has raged on through the ages:

"Line." "Form."
"Line." "Form."
"Line." "Form."
"Line." "Form."
"Line." "Form."
"Line." "Form."
"Line." "Form."
"Line." "Form."
"Line." "Form."

"Oh yeah?" "Yeah."
"Oh yeah?" "Yeah."
"Oh yeah?" "Yeah."
"Oh yeah?" "Yeah."
"Oh yeah?" "Yeah."
"Oh yeah?" "Yeah."
"Oh yeah?" "Yeah."


"Tastes Great." "Less Filling."


As formal element of art, line provides outline, boundaries, contrast, transmuted by the artifice of art to become content. Line supports content, line defines space, line becomes the signifier of perceived rational or emotive contextual Geistesgeschichte. Emotive linearality defines our iconographic hermeneutic - form-giving, life-giving artifice. In other words, "tastes great."

Wars have been fought, kingdoms won and lost, Arthur and Sir Gawain, Michaelangelo, Da Vinci, Picasso v. Titanicus, Jutes v. Angles, The Linists of Saxony v. the Formists of Debuque, and so on ad nauseum. Over and over again the great debates incited the passions and inflamed cultural tertiary typologies in an recurring periodistic camera obscura Medician epigram:

Oh! la belle statue! Oh! le beau piedestal!
Les vetus sont a pied el le vide a cheval!

or not to be outdone - Alexej Jawlensky (1864-1941), during his later period, more abstract, more Byzantine who said that "art is nostalgia for God." Who incidentally has his works both in Wiesbaden and Pasadena, California.


See my point?


Line delineates form - form provides line, line accomplishes form, form provides line.

"Tastes great." "Less filling."
"Less filling." "Tastes great."


Consider this question which I believe perfectly illustrates the contextual axiotelemetric megalographic elements of the argument:


If I draw a cow, is it a cow or a picture of a cow?

Clearly it is a picture of a cow and not a cow.

But:

If I draw a line, is it a line or a picture of a line?

Not so clear now, is it?



Just remember what Plato wrote: "I do not now intend by beauty of shapes what most people would expect, such as that of living creatures or pictures, but...straight lines and curves and the surfaces or solid forms produced out of these by lathes and rulers and squares....These things are not beautiful relatively, like other things, but always and naturally and absolutely." Philebus.

More on this later.


On the death of Marlon Brando: I'll miss him. We used to hang out together in South Omaha along with Peter and Jane Fonda and Nick Nolte. We'd hang out in the alley behind the Phillips Department Store smoking cigarettes, the parking lot at the Stockyards Building, play basketball at the South Omaha Boys Club, and pray together at my dad's two small Congregational churches at 35th and R and 24th and Deerpark (this one is now gone). Growing up as kids together is a memory I'll cherish forever. Interestingly enough, Marlon and I called each other "Buddy." We grew apart later in life much to his regret which led to his overeating and weight problems. Remember - cherish your friends - you never know what the future will bring (or the past).

More on this later.




Thus endeth No. 3


Later,

Bud