WOMAN IN ART
would not have let the cakes burn on the hearth while he dreamed away the barriers to his throne.
There is a great hue and cry these days for something new and original in art. You must not paint from nature as it is, or you will be a copyist and your canvas will be too crowded; just get an idea or outline. As for color, no two pairs of eyes see color alike; one sees a red cow, another paints the same blue or purple. One can see the exquisite palpitating beauty in the human form divine; others see it gross or emaciated to a skeleton in a death dance. Some see the poetic, the imaginary aspect of life, still others cling to the practical, the commonplace, the stereotyped or even the cubic. Some make use of the symbolic, drifting into the mists of humanity's background of ancient and medieval centuries, for a motif and its treatment. The philosopher-poet spoke a truth for all time when he said, "There is nothing new under the sun." All forms of nature may be hauled in at the studio gate and pass out elongated or discolored as decorative. All these things are permissible, but not all are beautiful. The ultimate of art is beauty.
When a dream motif combines the elements of art in well-balanced harmony—proportionate to the subject—we have indeed a work of art.
England has furnished the world with such an artist.
Miss Jessie Bayes has made dreamland very beautiful with her combination of a dreamed-of world haloed with the colors of dawn, or veiled with the approaching mists and purpling shadows of evening. She has peopled her lands with a psychic throng, as human and birdlike symbols of invisible attributes of spirit, of soul. She has transcribed the poet's dreams into the colors and actions of dreams, on sheets of vellum. She has been in league with "The Erl King's Daughter," as she sent her fairy servants to their several tasks. She has painted the fairy queen on a milk-white stag, in a forest made royal with mauves and blues, and produced a ray of sunset gold to glint her form and her waving hair. The spiring spruce trees, too, are a dreamed-of blue against the blue of a Northern sky.
The decorations for the "Marriage of La Belle Melusein" are fairies and goblins and elves, with floral fastoons and the chest of her dower to unite them. A glance askance at the many-twinkling feet of the fairies, the eye chases the hare and the squirrel for fleetness, bound also for the wedding. 'Neath the canopied chariot rides the queen to her bridal, drawn by two milk-white deer, and the white love-birds fly above them.
Miss Bayes' work is full of poetry of color and of action. She has a rare
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