These past few weeks/months I have found nature, even more than usual, a source of comfort and distraction. Spring has been offering us her technicolor gifts during one of the most trying times of our lives, and I hope anyone reading this is discovering the generous therapy that nature is providing and always has.
In the pandemic evenings, after a day of work, sitting too long at the computer, and after a reconvening of the family for dinner, I've been pulled into the "studio" in a desire to transform nature, flowers in particular, into two dimensional color play. This creative space is sanctuary, shelter from the storm, which Robert Henri (an artist and one of America's greatest art instructors) describes in The Art Spirit. Though written some 97 years ago, the book and especially this passage (pp. 93-94) is extraordinarily relevant to the moment:
"In these times there is a powerful demarcation between the surface and the deep currents of human development. Events and upheavals, which seem more profound than they really are, are happening on the surface. But there is another and deeper change in progress. It is of long, steady persistent growth, very little affected and not at all disturbed by surface conditions. The artist of today should be alive to this deeper evolution on which all growth depends, has depended and will depend. On the surface there is the battle of institutions, the illustration of events, the strife between peoples. On the surface there is propaganda and there is the effort to force opinions. The deeper current carries no propaganda. The shock of the surface upheaval does not deflect it from its course. It is in search of fundamental principle; that basic principle of all, which in degree as it is apprehended points the way to beauty and order, and to the law of nature."
Under the surface of this viral upheaval, the storm, that consumes us, let us find the deeper current that reminds us of the law of nature and the essence of the art spirit in all of us.
