one of the purposes of "art" ?

[roweenie]

Yes.

[hup_d_dup]

Could be.








Could be.

[windshieldbug]

Certainly the ones who composed "pastural" symphonies...

[Rick Denney]

Most art has to translate feelings triggered by one set of senses to a different set of senses--and that applies to visual art as well as music. I think it succeeds when the feelings come through, and fails when the translation skips the feelings, or attempts to express contrived feelings rather than authentically experienced feelings.

Artists have to feel something before they have anything to express, it seems to me. If what they hope to communicate is too objective to give them a feeling worth expressing, then they should write a book--of nonfiction, or develop an illustration (drafting rather than art).

That said, I can feel the same awe, confusion, exhiliration, humility, anger, love, worry, reverence, admiration--all that stuff can be generated in cities as well as in "nature". (As if what we, as humans that are as much a part of nature as are mountains, can depart from nature by what we create.)

Ralph Vaughan Williams's First Symphony was about the sea, but really it was about the feelings he felt on reading poems about the sea, not about any experiences he had with the sea itself. His Symphony No. 2 was just the opposite--it was an homage to the exhiliration he felt while in his favorite place--London. His Third was pastoral, but it was about the feeling of being in the open in the French countryside in the quiet of the morning--during WWI--not really about nature. His 4th Symphony was--famously--"about F minor". But its expressions were so strong that people assumed it was about war, particularly WWII, which it could not have been, having predated it by some years. Sometimes, those feelings have no time and place, or any particular visual image.

Rick "telling a story does not imply an objective narrative" Denney

[Three Valves]

Yes, even 17th Century painters idealized rural life.