*EDITORIAL®

We are able to attend art school through
a variety of reasons, and in general we
are conscious of our good fortune accord-
ing to the difficulty we have had in
obtaining it. We are aware, or should
be, that this is valuable time in which we
have the opportunity of arming ourselves
with a well-rounded knowledge of the
philosophy and technique of our craft. The
opportunity, too, to sort out our thoughts
and attempt to achieve an attitude, a direc-
tion which will be capable of receiving
the disturbing variety of opinion and
thought, often apparently contradictory, to
which we are exposed and weathering the
storm; taking that which is of value and
rejecting that which is irrevelant and mere-
ly clouds the issue, and that which. is
actually destructive.

In doing this, we are likely, if we are
not careful, to find ourselves headed down
any number of side-tracks, all of which
lead to dead ends.

We are confronted today with a great
number of movements and doctrines of
painting which have come into being since
the time of Cezanne. Since these are
often apparently incompatible, there exists
in the minds of many art students con-
siderable confusion, or if not confusion, a
lack of clarity of purpose.

This is no doubt partly due to the fact
that we are often prone to consider any-

thing that has come before Cezanne as
belonging to a bygone age, containing
little of value to us, who are progressive,
and have eyes only for the future. There
is a tendency to take as one of the chief
standards of excellence of a work of art
its newness, and originality, its lack of
dependence on "‘tradition”’.

Also, there are countless words, labels,
which we are constantly encountering, in
conversation and in reading, which when
applied to works of art and artists are
often assumed to be of the utmost import-
ance; and an artist or painting that can
be conveniently placed under one or other
of these labels is considered to be valid,
and understood. A good many of us con-
sume much of our energy and time at-
tempting to label everything we encounter,
including our own productions. In the
words of Clive Bell, “If we cannot lose
this habit of calling artists names, at least
let us know exactly what we mean by
them. By associating artists with move-
ments and counter-movements we encour-
age the superstition that in art there is
some important distinction besides the dis-
tinction between good and bad. There is
not. ... If we are to get rid of those
misleading labels from which works of
art are supposed to derive a value over
and above their aesthetic value, the first
to go should be those arch-deceivers,
traditional’ and ‘revolutionary’. Let us
understand that tradition is nothing but the

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. . - - Don Jarvis

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Loise White
Pearl White

Jocelyn Wragge, Phyllis Peters,

Sylvia Sinclair, John Bazett,

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Mr. Kastner

- Bill Calder

essence, congealed and preserved for us
by the masters in their works, of innum-
erable movements; and that movements are
mere phases of the tradition from which
they spring and in which they are swal-
lowed up.’ The works of the great artists
stand out from the movements and schools
that existed around them and which have
long since petered out and died.

What concerns us as art students is the
question of what we are to learn from
these works.

Genuine artists have always been en-
gaged in the working out and perfecting
of a form which will give external evi-
dence of their innermost awareness of the
world in which they find themselves.
This awareness is conditioned by many
things: the personality and character of
the artist; his geographical location; his
social environment; what he has seen
through the eyes of other artists in their
own works. The honest artist accepts
these modifying conditions, and produces
fine works not in spite of them but be
cause of them. Further, he works not
only for his own satisfaction, but to com-
municate to others by means of his medi-
um what he has realized of his experience.

Our job, then, is first to know ourselves,
to become aware of our own personality;
then to examine more closely our environ-
ment, to attempt to see it in relation to
some wider scheme. We will probably
find, or have already found, that there is
something we can say, or express, which
is particularly suited to our medium, what-
ever it happens to be, but which defies
definition in words. The peculiarity, and
strength, of visual art is that what is said
can be said in no other way, and cannot
be seized upon with mere words, although
volumes have been written in the attempt.

The artist possesses a tremendous re-
sponsibility who detects something in his
consciousness worthy of expression. He
must set out resolutely to pull down all
obstacles in the way of that expression.
Problems present themselves which will
successively occupy him and.which he
will successively overcome as long as he
continues to work.

Our task is to realize our problems as
they occur, to see the solutions which are
implicit in the works of the masters, past
and present, and to conscientiously apply
ourselves to the working out of our own
solutions. By so doing, and by a con-
stant orientation to our surroundings, we
will give our work meaningful form, and
it will command attention from all those
who recognize serious endeavour.