Saturday, February 23, 2013

Mrs. Festini's Hat Box, parts 1258 - 1261



1258. Now lets return to my drawing here on the chalk board, it is a view, seen by a person who is sitting on the beach, eye level with the woman's knees. If I had taken a photograph of her, the horizon line would be in the same place, but if I stood up with my camera and I was a little taller than her, the horizon line would pass over her head slightly. The horizon line is always the eye level line of the viewer, not the eye level line of the subject depicted.


1259. When you get home from the beach it will be late, the moon will be out, look at it there up in the sky, notice how it glows with that strange omnipotent silver light. But now just jump up and down a few times there in the driveway and notice that the moon jumps up and down also, just like the horizon did. Why is this? How can the moon have time to pay so much attention to us, to know our every movement?


1260. Do you see what I mean then, by saying that perspective had a religious element to it. For Mrs. Festini the fact that you could say that the stars and the moon, or the horizon kind of follow you around as you walk from place to place was not just a curiosity of optics, but a symbol of the divine nature of the very universe.



1261. I was getting carried away telling everyone all of this about Mrs. Festini's lectures and I did not know if I was holding the interest of my listeners, but the subject was the teaching of art and it could not but arouse either the interest or the ire of Buboni who interrupt me. He wanted to talk about the snowflakes that third graders make when they cut out paper napkins; the metaphor Mrs. Festini said the professor used in dismissing the paintings of Emma and Charles.

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