Artistic vision

The common denominator of artistic expression is the ordering of a vision into a consistent, complete form. The difference between a mere expression, however intense and revealing, and an artistic image of that expression lies in the structure of the form. This structure is specific. The colours, lines, and shapes corresponding to our sense impressions are organized into a balance, a harmony or rhythm that is in an analogous correspondence with feelings, and these in turn are analogues of thoughts and ideas. An artistic image, therefore, is more than a pleasant tickle of the senses and more than a graph of emotions. It has meaning in depth, and at each level there is a corresponding level of human response to the world. In this way, an artistic form is a symbolic form grasped directly by the senses but reaching beyond them and connecting all the strata of our inner world of sense, feeling, and thought. The intensity of the sensory pattern strengthens the emotional and intellectual pattern; conversely, the intellect illuminates such a sensory pattern, investing it with symbolic power. This essential unity of primary sense experience and intellectual evaluation makes the artistic form unique in human experience and therefore in human culture.

Images deriving solely from a rational assessment of the external world, without passion of the eyes, are only topographical records. Images of emotional responses without real roots in the environment are isolated graphs of a person's inner workings: they do not yield symbolic form. And the most beautiful combinations of colour and shape, the most exquisitely measured proportions of line, area, and volume, leave no effect if they have not grown out of rational and emotional participation in the total environment. Each of these visions is a fragment only.

The essential unity of first-hand percept and intellectual concept makes artistic images different from scientific cognition or simple animal response to situations. It is the unity of the sensory, emotional, and rational that can make the orderly forms of artistic images unique contributions to human culture.