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Файл:Английский язык для профессионального общения. Искусство и дизайн = English for Professional Communication. Art and Design. Учебное пособие
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Supplementary Reading
The final impression I received was of a prodigious effort to express
some state of the soul. He did not hesitate to simplify or to distort if he
could get nearer to that unknown thing he sought. Though these pictures
confused and puzzled me, I was moved by the emotion that was patent in
them; and, I knew not why, I felt an overwhelming compassion and tried
to explain my feelings.
“I do not know what infinite yearning possesses you,” I said to him.
“I see you as the eternal pilgrim to some shrine that perhaps does not
exist. I do not know at what inscrutable Nirvana you aim. Do you know
yourself? Perhaps it is Truth and Freedom that you seek.
He smiled dryly and pulled his beard.
“You are a dreadful sentimentalist, my poor friend.”
A week later I heard by chance that Strickland had gone to Marseilles.
I never saw him again.
TEXT 4. THE SECOND DEADLY SIN
1. Read about one of Americaʼs most popular noveliʼsts Lawrence
Sanders and his masterpiece. Do you like reading novels of psychological suspense?
Lawrence Sanders was born in Brooklyn in New York City. After
public school he attended Wabash College, where he obtained a Bachelor
of Arts degree. He then returned to New York and worked at Macyʼs
Department Store. In 1943 he joined the United States Marine Corps and
was discharged in 1946. Sanders was a former magazine editorial writer
and later turned to full-time fiction writing. He wrote his first novel, The
Anderson Tapes, in 1970, at the age of 50. It deals with a plot by a group
of criminals to rob a luxury apartment building. In 1971, Sanders received
an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for best first
novel. His Archy McNally series was continued by author Vincent Lardo.
The artist Victor Maitland was murdered in his Manhattan studio in
New York. The body was discovered by Saul Geltman, Maitland’s exclusive agent. Police detective Edward Delaney started investigating the
case. The team of detectives began looking into the painter’s private life
and personal affairs. They questioned a long list of artists, models, art
dealers, art critics, drinking companions, and a few distant relatives,
none of whom seemed particularly distressed by the sudden death of
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II. Miscellaneous
Victor Maitland. Depending on the education and / or social status of the
acquaintance questioned, the dead man was described as everything
from ‘an offensive and disagreeable individual’ to ‘a lousy bastard’.
Wishing to form his own opinion, Chief Delaney bought a book of
Maitland’s paintings.
2. Read the excerpt of The Second Deadly Sin. Find the sentences
that surprised you most and explain why.
The Second Deadly Sin
after Lawrence Sanders
It was practically all black-and-white and full-colour reproductions of
Maitland’s paintings on slick paper. The limited text consisted of a short
introduction, a biography of the artist, a listing of his complete work, and
an essay by an art critic analyzing it. Delaney began to read.
The essay, although attempting to be moderate and judicial in tone,
added up to a panegyric. According to the writer, Victor Maitland had
breathed fresh life into the techniques of the great Italian masters, had
turned his back on the transient fashions of contemporary art and, going
his own way, had imbued the traditional, representational style of painting
with a passion that had not been seen for centuries.
There was much more of a technical nature that Edward Delaney
could not completely comprehend. But it was not difficult to understand
the critic’s admiration, his awe [ɔ:] (благоговение) at what Maitland had
done. “Awe” was the word used in the text. Delaney responded to it
because it was exactly what he had felt on first looking at those rough
sketches in Maitland’s studio. Not only awe at the man’s talent, but wonder
and a kind of dread in seeing beauty he had never known existed.
“At last,” the critic concluded, “America has a painter of the first
magnitude who devotes his art to the celebration of life.”
But not for long, Delaney thought morosely. He was an untrained
amateur when it came to the appreciation of art. He acknowledged this.
But he loved painting and sculpture. And the cool, ordered ambience of
museums, the richness of gilt frames, the elegance of marble pedestals.
He had tried to educate himself by reading books on art history and art
criticism. But he found the language so recondite that he wondered if it
was not deliberately designed to confuse the uninitiated. But, he admitted,
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the fault might be his: an inability to grasp art theory, to follow the turgid
logic of cubists, abstractionists, and all the other art “schools” that
followed one after another in such rapid and bewildering succession.
Finally, he was forced back to his own eye, his own taste: that much
scorned cliche “I know what I like when I see it,” sensing dimly that it
served for the butcher who liked sunsets painted on black velvet as well
as for the most ideological of art experts who wrote knowingly of
asymmetrical tensions, and exogenous calcification.
Edward Delaney liked paintings that were recognizable. A nude was
a
nude, an apple an apple, a house a house. He found technique interesting and enjoyable; the folds of satin in the paintings of Ingres were
a delight. But technique was never enough. To be truly satisfying,
a painting had to move him. A painting did not have to be beautiful; it had
to be true. Then it was beautiful.
Most of Victor Maitland’s paintings were true. Delaney not only saw
it, he felt it. There were a few still lifes, one or two portraits, several cityscapes. But Maitland had painted mostly the female nude. Many of the
subjects were certainly not beautiful, but all of the paintings were bursting
with that “celebration of life” the critic had noted.
But that was not what impressed Chief Delaney most about Maitland’s
work. It was the purpose of the artist, the use he made of his talent. There
was something frantic there, some-thing almost deranged. It was, Delaney
thought, a superhuman striving to be aware of life and capture it with
cold paint on rough canvas. It was a manic greed to know it all, own it all,
and to display the plunder.
Saul Geltman received Delaney in his office.
“What kind of a man was Maitland?” Delaney asked.
“As a human being, a terrible, frightening, mean, contemptible, cruel,
heartless son of a bitch. As an artist, a giant, a saint, a god, the one real
genius I’ve seen in this business in the last twenty years. A century from
now you and I will be nothing. Dust. But Victor Maitland will be something. His paintings in museums. Books on him. Immortal. I really mean
that.”
“So you put up with his miserable personality because of his talent?”
“No,” Geltman smiled. “I put up with his miserable personality
because of the money he made me. Fifteen years ago I sold cheap
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II. Miscellaneous
reproductions. Van Gogh’s sunflowers and Monet’s water lilies. Then
Victor Maitland entered my life, and today I’m worth almost a quarter of
a million. “The bulk of my income came from him; I don’t deny it. But
I
represent other artists. I do okay. If Maitland had left me, I wouldn’t
have starved. He got killed, but I’m still in business. But there is something else ... when I was a kid, I wanted to be a violinist. So I studied,
I practiced. And one day I was playing a Bach concerto, and I suddenly
stopped, put the fiddle away, and I haven’t touched it since. I don’t mean
I was bad, but I just didn’t have it. At least I had sense enough to know;
no one had to tell me. Studying isn’t enough, and practicing isn’t enough.
If you haven’t got it in the genes, you’ll always be a second-rater, no
matter how good you force yourself to be. Maitland had it in his genes.
Not just talent – genius. Hey, genius and genes! Is that where the word
comes from? I got to look it up. But Maitland had it, and it’s too rare to let
go of just because the guy insults you in public and treats you like dirt.
I represent a lot of other artists. Good artists. But Maitland was the only
genius I had, and probably ever will have.”
“Victor was a throwback. A dinosaur. He knew what was going on in
painting in this country in the Fifties and Sixties. Abstract Expressionism,
Pop-Art, Minimal, all the avant-garde idiocies. But Maitland paid no
attention to it. He went his way. Traditional. Representational. And you’d
be surprised how many people want paintings they can recognize,
paintings that tell a story, beautiful paintings. And Maitland could paint
beautiful. A marvelous colorist. A marvelous draftsman. A marvelous
anatomist.”
“But it can’t be wholly a matter of technique,” Delaney said. “It was
something more.”
“Oh, yes,” Geltman nodded. “Much, much more. Without trying to
intellectualize what Maitland did, I think it’s obvious that he, in a way,
spiritualized sensuousness. Or maybe a better way of putting it would be
to say that he conceptualized physical passion. So you can look at his
nudes and feel no more lust than you would on viewing the Venus de
Milo.”
“Can I?” Delaney said dryly.
Geltman laughed shortly.
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“Well, let’s say I can,” he said. “To me, there’s nothing carnal in
Maitland’s work. I see his paintings as essentially sexless. They’re more
the idea of sex, the visual representation of a conception. But I admit,
that’s my personal reaction. You might see something entirely different.”
“I do,” Delaney assured him.
“That’s one of Maitland’s greatest gifts,” Geltman nodded. “He’s
everything to everyone. He gives you back what you bring to his art and
conforms your secret dreams.”
He swiveled to face them, his eyes wet.
“What can I tell you?” he said, his voice clogged. “I was so ambivalent
about him. I hated his guts. But if I had the money, I’d buy everything he
did, buy it for myself, line my apartment walls with it, lock the door, and
just sit there and stare.”
TEXT 5. IN THE FRAME
1. The main character of the book In the Frame by Dick Francis is
Charles Todd, a painter. Read about Dick Francis and his racing
world. Try to predict to what genre Charles Toddʼs paintings
belonged.
Richard Stanley Francis (31 October 1920 – 14 February 2010) was
a British crime writer, and former steeplechase jockey, whose novels
centre on horse racing in England.
After wartime service in the RAF (Royal Air Force), Francis became
a full-time jump-jockey, winning over 350 races and becoming champion
jockey of the British National Hunt. He came to further prominence in
1956 as jockey to Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, riding her horse
Devon Loch which fell when close to winning the Grand National. Francis
retired from the turf and became a journalist and novelist.
All his novels deal with crime in the horse-racing world, with some of
the criminals being outwardly respectable figures. The stories are
narrated by one of the key players, often a jockey, but sometimes a trainer,
an owner, a bookie, or someone in a different profession, peripherally
linked to racing. This person is always facing great obstacles, often
including physical injury, from which he must fight back with determination. More than forty of these novels became international best-sellers.
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II. Miscellaneous
2. A successful painter of horses flies to Australia to see his
married cousin Donald, finds his house burgled and his wife, Regina,
murdered. Though Donald is shocked he asked the painter to do his
wife’s portrait.
In the Frame
after Dick Francls
I hated autumn. The time of melancholy, the time of death. My spirits
fell each year with the soggy leaves and revived only with crisp winter
frost. Psychiatric statistics proved that the highest suicide rate occurred
in the spring, the time for rebirth. If ever I jumped over a cliff, it would
be in the depressing months of decay.
The sunroom was grey and cold. No sun, that Sunday.
I went upstairs, fetched my suitcase, and brought it down. Over years
of wandering journeys I had reversed the painterʼs traditional luggage:
my suitcase now contained the tools of my trade, and my satchel, clothes.
The large toughened suitcase, its interior adapted and fitted by me, was
in fact a sort of portable studio, containing besides paints and brushes
a light collapsible metal easel, unbreakable containers of linseed oil and
turpentine, and a rack which would hold four wet paintings safely apart.
There were also a dust sheet, a large box of tissues and generous amounts
of white spirit, all designed for preventing mess and keeping things clean.
The organization of the suitcase had saved and made the price of many
a sandwich.
I untelescoped the easel and set out my palette, and on a middlingsized canvas laid in the beginnings of a melancholy landscape, a mixture
of Donaldʼs garden as I saw it, against a sweep of bare fields and gloomy
woods. Not my usual sort of picture, and not, to be honest, the sort to
make headline news a century hence; but it gave me at least something to
do. I worked steadily, growing ever colder, until the chillier Frost chose
to depart; and he went without seeing me again, the front door closing
decisively on his purposeful footsteps.
He was gone all day. I spent it painting.
Not the sad landscape. The sunroom seemed even greyer and colder
that morning, and I had no mind anymore to sink into melancholy. I left
the half-finished canvas on the table there and removed myself and
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trappings to the source of warmth. Maybe the light wasn’t so good in the
kitchen, but it was the only room in the house with the pulse of life.
I painted Regina standing beside her cooker, with a wooden spoon in
one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. I painted the way she held her
head back to smile, and I painted the smile, shiny-eyed and guileless and
unmistakably happy. I painted the kitchen behind her as I literally saw it
in front of my eyes, and I painted Regina herself from the clearest of
inner visions. So easily did I see her that I looked up once or twice from
her face on the canvas to say something to her, and was disconcerted to
find only empty space. An extraordinary feeling of the real and unreal
disturbingly tangled.
I seldom ever worked for more than four hours at a stretch because for
one thing the actual muscular control required was tiring, and for another
the concentration always made me cold and hungry; so I knocked off at
around lunch-time and dug out a tin of corned beef to eat with pickles on
toast, and after that went for a walk, dodging the front-gate watchers by
talking to the apple trees and wriggling through the hedge.
I tramped aimlessly for a while round the scattered shapeless village,
thinking about the picture and working off the burst of physical energy
I
often felt after the constraint of painting. More burnt umber in the folds
of the kitchen curtains, I thought; and a purplish shadow on the saucepan.
Reginaʼs cream shirt needed yellow ochre under the collar, and probably
a touch of green. The cooking stove needed a lot more attention, and I had
broken my general rule of working the picture as a whole, background
and subject pace by pace.
This time, Reginaʼs face stood out clearly, finished except for a gloss
on the lips and a line of light along inside the lower eyelids, which one
couldnʼt do until the under paint was dry. I had been afraid of seeing her
less clearly if I took too long, but because of it the picture was now out of
balance and Iʼd have to be very careful to get the kitchen into the same
key, so that the whole thing looked harmonious and natural and as if it
couldnʼt have been any other way.
The wind was rawly cold, the sky a hurrying jumbled mass of
darkening clouds. I huddled my hands inside my anorak pockets and slid
back through the hedge with the first drops of rain.
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II. Miscellaneous
The afternoon session was much shorter because of the light, and
I
frustratingly could not catch the right mix of colours for the tops of the
kitchen fitments. Even after years of experience, what looked right on the
palette looked wrong on the painting. I got it wrong three times and
decided to stop.
The portrait of Regina, though, was the best work I’d done for months.
She laughed out of the canvas, alive and glowing, and to me at least
seemed vividly herself. Pictures often changed as one worked on them,
and day by day the emphasis in my mind had shifted, so that the kitchen
background was growing darker and less distinct and Regina herself
more luminous. In the end I had painted the kitchen, which was still
there, as an impression, and the girl, who was not, as the reality. [11]
READING FOR PLEASURE
1. Read the quotations from the books by Oscar Wilde. Say ones
you like best or donʼt like at all.
Witty Quotes
by Oscar Wilde
“To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.ˮ
“The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.ˮ
“The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.ˮ
“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are cor rupt without
being charming. This is a fault.ˮ
“Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the
cultivated. For these there is hope.ˮ
“They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.
“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.ˮ
“Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.ˮ
“The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban
[´kælɪbæn] seeing his own face in a glass.ˮ
“The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban
not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the
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Reading for Pleasure
subject-matter of the artist, but the morality Jity of art consists in the
perfect use of an imperfect medium.ˮ
“No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be
proved.ˮ
“No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is
an unpardonable mannerism of style.ˮ
“No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.ˮ
“Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.ˮ
“Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.ˮ
“From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the
musician.ˮ “From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the
type.ˮ
“All art is at once surface and symbol.ˮ
“Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who
read the symbol do so at their peril.ˮ
“It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of
opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and
vital.ˮ
“When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can
forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it.
The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it
immensely. All art is quite useless.ˮ
2. Here is a cheat sheet. All the information would fill several
encyclopedias. As an introduction, here are a few basic concepts.
Colour
The Colour Wheel
A colour circle, based on red, yellow and blue, is traditional in the
field of art. Sir Isaac Newton developed the first circu
colours in 1666. Since then scientists and art
ists have studied and designed
lar diagram of
numerous variations of this concept. Differences of opinion about the
validity of one for mat over another continue to provoke debate. In reality,
any colour circle or colour wheel which presents a logically arranged
sequence of pure hues has merit.
Primary colours: red, yellow and blue. In traditional colour theory,
these are the three pigment colours that can not be mixed or formed by
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II. Miscellaneous
any combination of other colours. All other colours are derived from
these three hues.
Secondary colours: green, orange and purple. These are the colours
formed by mixing the primary colours.
Tertiary colours. These are the colours formed by mixing one
primary and one secondary colour (yellow-orange, red-orange, redpurple, blue-purple, blue-green and yellow-green).
Colour Harmony
Harmony can be defined as a pleasing arrangement of parts, whether
it be music, poetry, colour.
Emotional associations of Each Colour
We’ve spoken enough about the abstracts for brandings colours – let’s
dive into the hard facts (or at least some guidelines). Here’s a quick cheat
sheet for
colour meanings:
– passion, importance, attention;
red
orange – playfulness, friendly, vitality;
yellow – happiness, optimism, warning;
green
– nature, stability, prosperity (growth);
light Blue
dark Blue
purple
– tranquility, trust, openness;
– professionalism, security, formality;
– royalty, creativity, luxury;
pink – femininity, youth, innocence;
brown – rugged, earthy, old-fashioned;
white – clean, virtuous, healthy;
gray – neutrality, gloom, subdued;
black – powerful, sophisticated, edgy.
Feng Shui Tips for Your Home and Ofce
Feng Shui is a very popular and intriguing concept in home design
today. In addition to the life benefits it provides, it also offers a roadmap,
so to speak, of not just how to decorate but why. In short, it offers you, the
homeowner, design with purpose.
Did you know that over 50 % of women now run their own home busi-
ness or work from home? Get your compass out and find the following
directions because we are going to try and make things run a little
smoother for you using the ancient art of object placement – Feng Shui.
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