The Art Spirit

The value of a school should be in the meeting of students. The art school should be the life-centre of a city. Ideas should radiate from it.

Do whatever you do intensely.

Self-education, only, produces expression of self. Don’t ask for a criticism until you are sure you can’t give it yourself. Then you will be in a fine state to receive it. You cannot impose education on anyone.

I am sure there are many people—and there are artists—who have never seen a whole head. They look from feature to feature. You can’t draw a head until you see it whole. It’s not easy. Try it.

It takes a tremendous amount of courage to be young, to continue growing—not to settle and accept. The most beautiful life possible, wherein there is no sordidness, is only attainable by effort. To be free, to be happy and fruitful, can only be attained through sacrifice of many common but overestimated things.

The study of art is the study of the relative value of things. The factors of a work of art cannot be used constructively until their relative values are known. Unstable governments, like unstable works of art, are such as they are because values have not been appreciated.

Keep up the work. Try to reduce everything you see to the utmost simplicity. That is, let nothing but the things which are of the utmost importance to you have any place.

All outward success, when it has value, is but the inevitable result of an inward success of full living, full play and enjoyment of one’s faculties.

Let a student enter the school with this advice: No matter how good the school is, his education is in his own hands. All education must be self-education.