ART

ART

Is art one of Michael Angelo’s paintings? Is it the picture your first grader hands you and watches for your reactions to his first attempt at using paper and crayons? Or is it acting, singing, playing an instrument? Why do we declare “what you are doing is an art?” Is it because we recognize what they are doing is being done in a professional way? That the skill with which they play the piano is more than what hundreds of dollars in lessons could purchase?

The art of doing things well is to be commended, even praised. It isn’t everyone that recognizes art in any form. It isn’t everyone who can do anything skillfully that can be recognized as an artist. I play the piano, but Liberache was a artist. I also sing, but Ethel Waters was an artist.

I may not appreciate the Picasso’s of the world. To go to Paris or Rome and visit the great Art Galleries would be a wonderful experience. However, I would need an interpreter, and only through his eyes would I understand the magnificent paintings and then on a limited understanding.
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Now on the other hand, you give me a sun rise in Nassau Bahamas, or a sunset in Tennessee, then I can tell you about Art. You give me the cornfields of Iowa, or the wheat fields of Kansas, and then I can tell you about Art. Take me to the Rocky Mountains, the Ozark Mountains, the Blue Ridge, there I can find Art. What about the Atlantic or the Pacific Oceans where my eyes can only envision the world beyond my focus. I have seen the mighty ships sailing to, what to me, are unknown destinations, ships so large yet appearing miniature on the vast sea. Who can paint the picture that my eyes beheld? My camera cannot capture the beauty.

Take me to the country and let me hear the birds sing, the whippoorwill’s song in the night, the owl giving his haunting hoot, the bullfrogs serenading the darkness—let me set under the stars and try to count them, all the time breathing in the magnificence before me. This is Art.

I even know the painter, the Maker is better said. No one except the painter I know personally could paint such art, or in this world has there ever been an artist to match the form of art I appreciate. As talented as Michael Angelo was, or as perfect as Picasso may have been, or even the great painter of lights, Thomas Kincade of the twentieth century, there will never be one to capture on canvas what He did in a six days.

If you give me a painting by some famous painter, I would thank you and highly treasure it as costly and worthy to be placed in my home. Yet still my appreciation for the painting would not compare to the gratification and pleasure I get when I walk around the farm, watch a sunset in Tennessee or a sunrise in the Bahamas, or drive up Pike Peaks in Colorado or better still, look on the face of a newborn grandchild. Only when I am in the world He made do I become a student of the ARTS.