Life lessons -- my art is about the world I see

The Pumpkin Farmhouse

Maison De Haute Couleur 

Charvin, Paris Watercolour

on Fabriano paper

8 x 10 inches

Barbara Muir © 2017

(The farmhouse is gone now,

and I think there's a mall there.

When the boys were young we used to

visit the farm to pick our Thanksgiving and 

Halloween pumpkins).

Looking back on my posts on beauty, I found one that really said it all. 

Artists who produce work honouring the beauty they see on the

planet matter. Today Greta Thunberg is in the United States having sailed

across the ocean sometimes in very high seas in a sailboat.  Why?
 She loves the planet and wants us to save it.

Thinking about that, I realize that the poet John Keats pretty
well summed it up. Here's what I said in a former post:
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all Ye know on earth, 
and all ye need to know."John Keats -- Ode on a Grecian Urn.
I was raised on Keats; my mother could quote any poem she ever read, 
and did. Plus I studied English Literature at university, and the 
teachers who taught us about the Romantic poets were some of 
the most inspired and engaging professors I ever met...

During a stint of horrendous work in a small Ontario town
at a pizza restaurant, with an unscrupulously cruel boss, 
I heard that the town was a mecca for artists. One day
 I was  introduced to a young woman artist, and I was invited to her 
studio to see slides of her work. She created "art" out of dead animals
stuffed in awkward poses by a taxidermist, standing in shattered glass.

I thank her now because her work depressed me so much that
when I added her disturbing art to the mix of bad work, and no pay
I was dealing with, I left the town and never looked back.

 I can also thank her, because she helped me decide that art could
 be beautiful, and that creating appealing work was a calling
every bit as important as shocking and horrifying the public.
In short she sent me crying for mercy back into the pages of John
 Keats, where I now live celebrating the beauty I see any chance I get."

Have a saving the beautiful planet day.