The universe gave my roommate and I  the choice to either have this cat freeze and/or starve to death or take it in so we have a cat now!

Dannion Brinkley says that you are met by your pets when you die and see things through their eyes when you have a panoramic life review so it will be cool to see how happy the poor thing was to have a home after being outside in the cold rain for a day after her owners abandoned her.

We haven’t really decided on a name for her yet. I was leaning towards "Vincent" because half of one of her ears is missing (and I love Vincent van Gogh!) but Vincent isn’t a girls name so we’ll just let fate decide her official name.

Oh, before I forget, I just wanted to mention that the mighty Phillip Jose Farmer passed away the other day, he was one of the masters of sci-fi and lived in the little town that I do, Peoria Illinois. I bet his panoramic life review was full of love and admiration!

The other day I had the weirdest deja-vu while looking at the biography of Kenyan Cox (pic to the left), who, as far as I know is no relation, but he sure matches me to a dozen decimal places (as Robert Heinlein might have said!).  We look kind of similar and share a last name but it’s all the other weird little things that made me think I might have been a reincarnation of him.

First of all he was a totally dedicated artist, so dedicated that one of his famous quotes is "I paint because I cannot help it—because I love the work itself and would rather be a miserably bad painter than a successful man in any other work—because the mere joy of trying and even the excitement of failure are the only true pleasures for me.”^[1]

That is exactly how I feel about art!!!

Kenyon Cox was extremely successful and influencial as well walking the walk by painting nudes that the USA wasn’t quite liberal enough to accept in his day, but as is the case with art celebrities (such as our shared hero, Michaelangelo),  the public will be tollerant when they respect the artist. People painted and sculpted nudes centuries before Michaelangelo, but as Sha Na Na  re-defined the Do Wop classics and the Ramones revved up pop music to make pop punk , Michaelangelo took his poses to the extreme and the Baroque period of art that followed the Renaissance was an extended tribute to the doors that Michaelangelo had opened.

I have always expressed a desire to paint murals and have participated in many, heck, I even painted one during basic training in the Air Force haha! and you might know the name Kenyon Cox as one of the great American Muralists, and I have always written cheesy poetry that rhymes and so did Kenyon Cox.

She lived in Florence centuries ago,

That lady smiling there.

What her name or rank I do not know—

I know that she was fair.

For some great man — his name, like hers, forgot

And faded from Men’s sight—

Loved her — he must have loved her — and has wrought

This bust for our delight.

Whether he gained her love of had her scorn

Full happy was his fate.

He saw her, heard her speak; he was not born

Four hundred years too late.

The palace throngs in every room but this —

Here I am left alone.

Love, there is none to see — I press a kiss

             Upon thy lips of stone.

I love it! The wirdest deja-vu, and you’ll laugh or just just think I’m nuts, but trust that this is true, is that I totally remember writing a  girls name, scratching it rather, on the back of a metal badge, and while I totally remember the badge and even scratching the name in it, I can’t remember the girl, if there actually was one. So, after all the David Wilcock talks and blog entries, I have concluded that I am the reincarnation of Kenyon Cox! Why because that name was the name of his wife!

Kenyon painted this portrait of her and lived happily ever after with her, Louise Howland King Cox.

"And so, to our modern imagination, the neglected and misunderstood genius has become the very type of the great artist, and we have allowed our belief in him to color and distort our vision of the history of art. We have come to look upon the great artists of all times as an unhappy race struggling against the inappreciation of a stupid public, starving in garrets and waiting long for tardy recognition.

The very reverse of this is true. With the exception of Rembrandt, who himself lived in a time of political revolution and of the emergence to power of a burgher class, you will scarce find an unappreciated genius in the whole history of art until the beginning of the nineteenth century. The great masters of the Renaissance, from Giotto to Veronese, were men of their time, sharing and interpreting the ideals of those around them, and were recognized and patronized as such. Rembrandt’s greatest contemporary, Rubens, was painter in ordinary to half the courts of Europe, and Velazquez was the friend and companion of his king. Watteau and Boucher and Fragonard painted for the frivolous nobility of the eighteenth century just what that nobility wanted, and even the precursors of the Revolution, sober and honest Chardin, Greuze the sentimental, had no difficulty in making themselves understood, until the revolutionist David became dictator to the art of Europe and swept them into the rubbish heap with the rest.

It is not until the beginning of what is known as the Romantic movement, under the Restoration, that the misunderstood painter of genius definitely appears. Millet, Corot, Rousseau were trying, with magnificent powers and perfect single-mindedness, to restore the art of painting which the Revolution had destroyed. They were men of the utmost nobility and simplicity of character, as far as possible from the gloomy, fantastic, vain, and egotistical person that we have come to accept as the type of unappreciated genius; they were classically minded and conservative, worshippers of the great art of the past; but they were without a public and they suffered bitter discouragement and long neglect. Upon their experience is founded that legend of the unpopularity of all great artists which has grown to astonishing proportions. Accepting this legend, and believing that all great artists are misunderstood, the artist has come to cherish a scorn of the public for which he works and to pretend a greater scorn than he feels. He cannot believe himself great unless he is misunderstood, and he hugs his unpopularity to himself as a sign of genius and arrives at that sublime affectation which answers praise of his work with an exclamation of dismay: "Is it as bad as that?" He invents new excesses and eccentricities to insure misunderstanding, and proclaims the doctrine that, as anything great must be incomprehensible, so anything incomprehensible must be great. And the public has taken him, at least partly, at his word. He may or may not be great, but he is certainly incomprehensible and probably a little mad. Until he succeeds the public looks upon the artist as a more or less harmless lunatic. When he succeeds it is willing to exalt him into a kind of god and to worship his eccentricities as a part of his divinity. So we arrive at a belief in the insanity of genius. What would Raphael have thought of such a notion, or that consummate man of the world, Titian? What would the serene and mighty Veronese have thought of it, or the cool, clear-seeing Velazquez? How his Excellency the Ambassador of his Most Catholic Majesty, glorious Peter Paul Rubens, would have laughed!"

The paragraphs above were Taken from

ARTIST AND PUBLIC

AND OTHER
ESSAYS ON ART SUBJECTS

BY

KENYON COX

brilliant!!!

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Originally posted 2009-02-27 21:27:16. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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