“For the student of visionary art the interesting fact is that an image comes first and takes up residence in the mind long before the artist has any notion why it is there or what it means. Whether visions come from some great reservoir of symbolic images which are eternally there (and if one examines the recurrence of images in history this proposition is not quite as crazy as it sounds) or whether they are due to buried memories, their obsessive power over an artist's mind, and their clear, compulsive emergence in his work depends on a mental condition that can come and go. When, for some reason, they no longer present themselves to the mind's eye, alive or clamoring to be born, the visionary artist has a hard time — dark days. This is particularly true if he has lost the habit of feeding his mind on the observation of nature.”

— Kenneth Clark

Source: The Romantic Rebellion (1973), Ch. 6: Blake

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "For the student of visionary art the interesting fact is that an image comes first and takes up residence in the mind l…" by Kenneth Clark?

Kenneth Clark 47

Art historian, broadcaster and museum director 1903–1983

Related quotes

“The image of God always abides in the soul, whether this image be obsolete and clouded over as to amount to almost nothing; or whether it be obscured or disfigured, as is the case with sinners; or whether it be clear and beautiful as is the case with the just.”

Thomas Aquinas book Summa Theologica

I, q. 93, art. 8, ad 3
Summa Theologica (1265–1274)

“The symbol is the tool which gives man his power, and it is the same tool whether the symbols are images or words, mathematical signs or mesons.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

“With every artist comes the image he portrays and the picture that he paints”

Eminem (1972) American rapper and actor

"One Day at a Time" (featured on Tupac: Resurrection, 2003)
2000s

“Students have powerful images of what a perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one.”

Allan Bloom book The Closing of the American Mind

Source: The Closing of the American Mind (1987), p. 67.

“Other times I am pestered by a recurrent visual image and this image will resonate with some tone-rhythm pattern, only after that does language start to come.”

Jan Zwicky (1955) Canadian philosopher

'Perfect Fluency' interview with Scott Rosenberg, University of Wyoming Campus, Oct. 2010.
Other

“The role of the artist, of course, has always been that of image-maker. Different times require different images. Today when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is our reality. To my mind certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our time.”

Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974) American artist

The Ideas of Art, Tiger's Eye, Vol. 1, nr 2, December 1947, p. 43.
1940s

“Mathematical physics represents the purest image that the view of nature may generate in the human mind; this image presents all the character of the product of art; it begets some unity, it is true and has the quality of sublimity; this image is to physical nature what music is to the thousand noises of which the air is full…”

Théophile de Donder (1872–1957) Belgian physicist

as quoted by Ilya Prigogine in his Autobiography http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1977/prigogine-autobio.html given at the occasion of Prigogine's 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

“I realized that the image I had been given by my teachers, the scientists.... by their way of looking at Nature, was just another stage setting with all the magnificence and ingenuity that the genius of any artist produces in a work of art. I realized that in my scientific journey I had been under the power of a magic spell of a work of art whose reality was just as true as the verity of the image in an artist's vision.”

Naum Gabo (1890–1977) Russian sculptor

Quote from Of divers arts, (1962), p. 21; as cited in International Handbook on Giftedness, Larisa V. Shavinina (2009), p. 862
undated

“Artists are generally soft-spoken persons who are concerned with their inner visions and images. But that is precisely what makes them feared by any coercive society.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 1 : The Courage to Create, p. 32
Context: Artists are generally soft-spoken persons who are concerned with their inner visions and images. But that is precisely what makes them feared by any coercive society. For they are the bearers of the human being's age old capacity to be insurgent. They love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis. Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds.

“How can one be free of the images that one has? First of all, I must find out how these images come into being, what is the mechanism that creates them.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

Source: 1970s, The Awakening of Intelligence (1973), p. 337
Context: How can one be free of the images that one has? First of all, I must find out how these images come into being, what is the mechanism that creates them. You can see that at the moment of actual relationship, that is, when you are talking, when there are arguments, when there are insults and brutality, if you are not completely attentive at that moment, then the mechanism of building an image starts. That is, when the mind is not completely attentive at the moment of action, then the mechanism of building images is set in motion. When you say something to me which I do not like — or which I like — if at that moment I am not completely attentive, then the mechanism starts. If I am attentive, aware, then there is no building of images.

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Kenneth Clark 47

Related quotes

Related topics