“The Art Spirit” is a loose collection of thoughts, lecture notes and criticisms by the artist and teacher Robert Henri (1865-1929). My studio friend J. P. Sullivan gave me a copy of this book, which is one of his favorites (and now mine). It is inspirational and educational, not so much about specific technique but more the mindset of an artist. Again, rather than review the book, I cite some of my favorite passages. It was hard to select just these few.
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• He paints like a man going over the top of a hill, singing.
• For an artist to be interesting to us he must have been interesting to himself.
• I once met a man who told me that I always had an exaggerated idea of things. He said, “Look at me, I am never excited.” I looked at him and he was not exciting. For once I did not over-appreciate.
• The picture that bowls you over at first sight and the next day loses even the power to attract your attention is one that always looks the same. It has a moment of life but dies immediately thereafter.
• [Brush] strokes carry a message whether you will it or not. The stroke is just like the artist at the time he makes it. All the certainties, all the uncertainties, all the bigness of his spirit and all the littleness are in it.
• The picture that looks as if it were done without an effort may have been a perfect battlefield in its making.
• Don’t worry about your originality. You could not get rid of it even if you wanted to. It will stick to you and show you up for better or worse in spite of all you … can do.
• I would like to be in many activities. I think that anyone who has had the pleasures of study and work for years may be full of regret because he cannot practice in all the arts.
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• I have seen a whole gallery of pictures condemned with a sweep of the eye. I remember hearing a prominent artist on entering a gallery declare, “My eight-year-old child could do better than this.” [These] were pictures by Matisse, Cézanne and others.
• I cannot interest myself in whether [paintings] will pass juries or not. More paintings have been spoiled during the process of their making, through such considerations, than the judgments of juries are worth.
• To award prizes is to attempt to control the course of another man’s work. It is a bid to have him do what you will approve. It affects not only the one who wins the award, but all those who in any measure strive for it. Let the work they do get its honor in being what it is. Prizes generally go amiss. We must realize that artists are not in competition with each other.
• I am not interested in art as a means of making a living, but I am interested in art as a means of living a life.
Andy Warhol (1962)
• I was once asked by a young artist whether he could hope to make any money out of his work if he continued in his particular style of painting. He happened to be a man of considerable talent and had great enthusiasm in his work. But I knew there was no public enthusiasm for such work. I remembered he had told me that before he got really into art he had made a living by designing labels for cans, tomato cans and the like. I advised him to make tomato-can labels and live well that he might be free to paint as he liked.
[Footnote: Henri died when Andrew Warhola was not yet one year old.]
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• All things change according to the state we are in. Nothing is fixed. I lived once in the top of a house, in a little room, in Paris. I was a student. My place was a romance. It was a mansard room and it had a small square window that looked out over housetops, pink chimney pots. I could see l’Institut, the Pantheon and the Tour Saint Jacques. The tiles of the floor were red and some of them were broken and got out of place. There was a little stove, a wash basin, a pitcher, piles of my studies… My bed was a cot. It was a wonderful place. I cooked two meals and ate dinner outside. I used to keep the camembert out of the window on the mansard roof between meals, and I made fine coffee, and made much of eggs and macaroni. I studied and thought, made compositions, wrote letters home full of hope of some day being an artist.
It was wonderful. But days came when hopes looked black and my art student’s paradise was turned into a dirty little room with broken tiles, ashes fell from the stove, it was all hopelessly poor, I was tired of camembert and eggs and macaroni, and there wasn’t a shade of significance in those delicate little chimney pots, or the Pantheon, the Institut or even the Tour Saint Jacques.
• Today must not be a souvenir of yesterday, and so the struggle is everlasting. Who am I today? What do I see today? How shall I use what I know, and how shall I avoid being victim of what I know? Life is not repetition.
• The best art the world has ever had is but the impress left by men who have thought less of making great art than of living full and completely with all their faculties in the enjoyment of full play. From these the result is inevitable.
• Go in and find out. The future is in your hands.
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Henri would have me forget about originality and popularity — satisfaction lies in seeing and expressing. “The true artist regards his work as a means of talking with men, of saying his say to himself and to others.” Yes, that is exactly what I aspire to do.
The Asheville Citizen-Times reported today that “kindergartners with religious vaccine exemptions jumped to 4.22 percent in Buncombe County during the current school year — five times the state average and well above rates in surrounding counties.” It would be easy to start ranting about Bible Belt mountain folk, how they reject science and put the health of their children and the community at risk. But they are not alone by any means. According to the CDC, the rate of non-medical exemption from kindergarten vaccination in 2011-2012 was 4% or higher in eight states: Alaska, Idaho, Illinois, Michigan, Oregon, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin. These figures combine “religious” reasons with “philosophic” reasons — some states allow exemptions for one reason but not the other. North Carolina, for example, allows religious but not philosophic exemptions.
By contrast, the states with the lowest rates (0.6% or less) of non-medical exemptions from mandatory vaccination were Alabama, Delaware, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, Tennessee, Mississippi and West Virginia (the last two states do not allow religious or philosophical objections to vaccination). It is interesting to note that these groups of states cannot be divided neatly into any red-state vs blue-state, rich vs poor, urban vs rural, or religious vs secular dichotomy.
John M. Snyder, a Tufts University pediatrics professor and a practicing pediatrician in Massachusetts, offers a clue to this “I know nothing but I know best” stance in his recent contribution to the blog Science-Based Medicine. Snyder notes that, while he sees “the children of farmers, mechanics, refugees, and university professors” in his practice, those parents who challenge the recommended vaccination schedule “tend to be highly educated, economically privileged, and part of the cultural trend [of] self-empowerment and the questioning of authority.” You may judge for yourself how well that description fits the disparate populations of Alaska, Michigan, Oregon, Vermont and Asheville.
But I uncovered another correlation. I visited the website of the so-called American Association of Naturopathic Physicians (whoever they are and whatever they claim to be) and counted the number of natural medicine practices listed on that site, for each of the states mentioned above. I then divided the number of naturopathic practices in each state by the population of the state to find the number of such practices per million residents. Finally, I grouped the results according to the highest and lowest rates of non-medical vaccination exemptions among the states:
The online version of the Asheville Yellow Pages has no fewer than 81 entries under the heading of “Homeopathic Doctors” (an oxymoron to be sure, but that’s Asheville for you). This is a rate of 33o listings per million residents of Buncombe County, almost ten times greater than the per-capita number of naturopathic practices in Alaska. Small wonder then that there are so many vaccination scofflaws in this little town I live in.
Some people question authority without having the authority of knowledge themselves. Their thinking goes something like, “Doctors don’t know everything, therefore I will rely on my own fragmentary bits of information.” The extent to which people can defend their own ignorance, even as they acknowledge it and present it as a sign of intelligence*, is at the same time fascinating and depressing.
I say, feel free to swallow all the fish-oil capsules you want, and order all the lab tests that you think will guide you to physical and mental harmony, but please, for my sake and your neighbor’s sake as well as your children’s sake, let your children be vaccinated. Set aside your suspicions. Resist the temptation to cherry-pick stories that confirm your own bias. Embrace the fact that you are smart but do not necessarily know better than your doctor.
I leave the parting shot (if you will) to pediatric nurse practitioner Sue Ellen Collins: “There are many serious things parents have to make decisions about regarding their children’s welfare. Whether to vaccinate them is not one of them. It’s a no-brainer. Protect them, vaccinate them.”
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* Amy Carson of the group “Moms Against Mercury” told the Citizen-Times: “You have to remember, Asheville is a very health-minded city… I think that people are getting smarter because they are researching and they are asking questions and they are not getting the answers they are looking for, so they’re getting scared.”
I suggest that the Moms Against Mercury would be more informed and less scared if they were to read the abstract of this 2011 article published in Annals of Pharmacotherapy: “In 1998, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, a British gastroenterologist, described a new autism phenotype called the regressive autism-enterocolitis syndrome triggered by environmental factors such as measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccination. The speculative vaccination-autism connection decreased parental confidence in public health vaccination programs and created a public health crisis in England and questions about vaccine safety in North America. After 10 years of controversy and investigation, Dr. Wakefield was found guilty of ethical, medical, and scientific misconduct in the publication of the autism paper. Additional studies showed that the data presented were fraudulent. The alleged autism-vaccine connection is, perhaps, the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years.”