(On July 10, 2021, I presented the David Wemhoff Scholarship to a deserving art student at the South Bend Museum of Art. This is the text of my talk, brief as it is.)
Text On Presentation of David Wemhoff Scholarship
Hello and good afternoon everyone.
I wish to extend a hearty thanks to the Art League, the South Bend Museum of Art and everyone else who made possible today.
I am honored and humbled to have a scholarship named after me.
You should know that it takes both courage and love to make art. Someone once said that courage is needed to love and it takes love to take your talent to create and put it on display for all to see.
Richard Tansey and Fred Kleiner are the editors of Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, and in the introduction to the Tenth Edition, they write
“[A]rt…[is] something present – something that can be seen or touched—The fact is that a visible and tangible work of art is a kind of persisting event.”
When you create art, you are depicting what you perceive. This depiction, or presentation if you will, is done using different techniques, substances or media, styles. Every work of art must consider the technical, the medium, originality, and also aesthetics.
Aesthetics, Tansey and Kleiner tell us, have a number of elements. These are form, space, area and plane, line, axis, perspective, proportion, scale, light, value, hue and texture, and requires a certain order. These are each governed by principles that lend order and hence beauty to the work for they are essential to portraying truth through the eyes, the heart, the mind, of the artist.
I urge you all to continue with studying and making art for ultimately you are engaged in the comprehension of truth.
Thank you all and best wishes to everyone.