Oil Painting: Techniques and Materials [antikvár]

Preface My first remembrance of a summer night is when, as a boy, I lay in the grass listening to the sound of crickets while watching the stars. What I saw and heard that night seemed so vividly intense that sight and sound became fused in my memory asasingleexperience. Nowon summerevenings, listening with eyes closed, the bright sound of crickets is to me a sound pattern of starlight, and on cool winter evenings, when crickets sleep, the sharp staccato brilliance of a starry sky is to me a luminous version of cricket sounds. There are moments in our lives when an experience may become so indelibly impressed into the fabric of our consciousness that it permanently influences all future experiences of a similar nature. A work of art can produce such moments, during which the experience of the artist is communicated to the viewer. I know that I shall always find myself momentarily quarreling with nature whenever I see in the bright face of a sunflower an imitation of a more vigorous prototype painted by Van Gogh. I shall always become impatient with myself when the abstract beauty of a sunset seems to have been exclusively created forthe convenience of William Turner. Art has the power to awaken and resensi-tize the blunted consciousness of man, to make him aware of that which cannot be perceived through sight alone—the murmur of life in a starry expanse of sky, the vastness and mystery of space in the sounds of a summer night. Joseph Mugnaini ryi