“Consider that industrialism [. . .] - as we know it. The diabolical direction in which it is going – on which it actually prides itself – is the supersession of human labour in the necessaries of life by the machine. If they win, human labour will be only for hobbies – (fancy work, fret-work, 'pure art' they call it – art released from the necessity of making anything useful', and it has released the workman from the necessity of making anything at all – the machines will do the making – man will only mind the machines). The necessaries of human life – the things men need and therefore love, the things upon which, during the countless centuries of human history, men and women have expended all their care and skills and pride – the arts of agriculture and the farm, the arts of the kitchen, clothes, furniture, pottery and metal, the whole business of building – from cottages to cathedrals – all these things will be made or done by machines, and we shall be released for 'higher things'. So they say. But for the majority of men and women – for us – there are no higher things. If, as it says in St. James' epistle, 'true religion and undefiled is to visit the fatherless and the widows . . . ' then we may also say, this is true art – to make well what needs making – for love of God and for the service of our fellow men and women. And again, to keep ourselves 'unspotted from the world' – that is, the world of flattery and vanity and personal display, and exhibitions and museums, and art galleries and art critics and all art nonsense.” - Eric Gill

The artist is a type of person, an archetype. If one looks at the traditional caste system, we see the priest, the warrior, the artist/craftsmen and then the slave. The king stands at the apex of this hierarchy and embodies the two higher castes of the priest and the warrior. Both of these two higher castes being characterised by transcendence through contemplation and action respectively.

But back to the artist/craftsman, this person is a member of society and fits into his own place within it. His life is typically characterised by a love of work and God, a creative spirit who lives to emulate God by emulating his creative act. However, as God created something out of nothing, the artist must create something out of matter or material.

His work is an act, it is a process by which things come into being which prior did not exist. Take for example a house, a cathedral, a painting, a suit of armour etc. This act, this externalisation of knowledge (for he could not create something if he inwardly did not know what and how to create) takes skill. It is the skill of his art that is valued. This skill is something that he has dedicated the majority of his life to accruing. His work gives his life meaning, it gives him challenge, it presents endless difficulties, obstacles, hurdles to jump over, boulders to move with his mind. By continuing this path, he eventually attains mastery of his chosen craft, and his life has been a poetic journey and struggle.

The industrial revolution snatched this life and work away from many. Dispossessed surfs fled into the industrialising areas, forced into positions of wage slavery, robbed of their traditional vocations and robbed of the chance to be an artist. They had to toil at meaningless work to gain a pay check that would only postpone their starvation.

The Marxists said that the new liberated proletariat who are now free from 'labour' can spend their time writing poetry and creating paintings instead. Fast forward to today, the machine has changed form and twisted into something new. Now A.I can write poetry and create paintings for us. So what exactly are artists supposed to do? Considering that the artist is a type of person, who must act creatively in order to live up to his full potential, and know the joy of partaking in the act of creation. Is satan conspiring to eliminate this person entirely from the world?

A.I can create faster, and cheaper than an illustrator. We live in the age of the merchant where faster and cheaper are the watchwords of profiteering and of life as we know it. It seems only logical that the image maker is being set up to be swept aside totally in a repeating but different arch of history.

But what if this does happen, imagine in 50 or 100 years time, where people no longer have the skill, understanding or memory to create a drawing or a painting, or anything at all. We can no longer build cathedrals, is it too insane to image a future where we can no longer even draw a picture?

Our word 'culture' etymologically comes from the word agriculture - the cultivation and growth of crops.

True culture, is activity that cultivates and grows one's own soul in a positive orientation.

Activities like traditional art for example, allow the person to experience self overcoming, struggle, perseverance, dedication, discipline, contemplation, gradual mastery, experiencing the joy of creation etc.

Anything that removes or takes away these opportunities and experiences is anti-culture by definition.

“It should be obvious that it is not the physical labour which is bad, but the proletarianism by which men and women have become simple 'hands', simply instruments for the making of money by those who own the means of production, distribution, and exchange.

[…]

We must return again and again to the simple doctrine: physical labour, manual work, is not in itself bad. It is the necessary basis of all human production and, in the most strict sense of the words, physical labour directed to the production of things needed for human life is both honourable and holy. And we must remember that there are no exceptions.

Drudgery is not inherent in the nature of work, 'of itself', but in the sub-human conditions consequent upon commercialism, industrialism, and the abnormal growth of cities.” - Eric Gill

“Considering the history of the last three hundred or five hundred years, ask yourselves whether the control of politics by people whose one aim in working is the making of money, can be good for politics.

Ask yourselves whether the division of human beings into two classes, the responsible and the irresponsible, the people who control and the people who are controlled, a minority who do what they choose and a majority who have no power of choice can be a good thing.

Ask yourselves whether it can be a good thing to divorce the useful from the loveable, the necessary from the delightful, the artist from the workman.

Ask yourselves whether it can really be in accordance with the nature of man and his end that what he does to earn a living should be regarded as something to be got over as quickly as possible in order that he many have more leisure.” - Eric Gill

'The work of art has been pondered before being made, has been kneaded and prepared, formed, brooded over, and matured in a mind before emerging into matter. And there it will always retain the colour and savour of the spirit. It's formal element, what constitutes it of its kind and makes it what it is, is its being controlled and directed by the mind. . . . Artistic work therefore is specifically human work as opossed to the work of the beast or the machine; and for this reason human production is in its normal state an artisan's production, and therefore necessitates a strict individual appropriation. For the artist as such can share nothing in common; in the line of moral aspirations there must be a communal use of goods, whereas in the line of production the same goods must be objects of particular ownership. Between the two horns of this antinomy St. Thomas places the social problem...' - Maritain

"The abnormality of our time, that which makes it contrary to nature, is its deliberate and stated determination to make the working life of men & the product of their working hours mechanically perfect, and to relegate all the humanities, all that is of its nature humane, to their spare time, to the time when they are not at work." - Eric Gill

"The Leisure State is founded upon a false angelism, a false notion of the fitness of men to enjoy themselves without the direct responsibility of each one to earn his own living and that of his wife and children by his own work [. . .] It is the notion that matter is essentially evil and therefore work is essentially degrading. [. . .] that is the basis of our Leisure State - the release of man from his entanglement with matter. The highbrow exponents see it in highbrow terms - higher things, high art, beauty, contemplation . . . Ordinary people are not thus constituted. For them it means simply a release from drudgery and insecurity, from slum-life and overcrowding, from underfed and unhealthy children. It means more travel in motor-cars, at greater speeds, more racing, more football matches; in fact, more of everything but of that dreary business which industrialism has made of work - of which no one could be expected to wish anything but to see the last of it." - Eric Gill

“At the break-up of the medieval system two great disruptions were acting and inter-acting – the Reformation and the Renaissance. At the beginning of the fifteenth century the class of persons now called artists did not exist, nor was there such a thing as an architect's profession. There were simply various grades of workmen, skilled and less skilled, well know and honoured, or unknown and unhonoured. But the present distinction of classes among workmen was entirely undeveloped.

The modern distinction between the working classes, the middle classes and the upper classes was not to be found – There was a thing very different - different in its origins and in its effects. There was distinction of functions. There was no such thing as the gentleman as such or so called. The king was honoured as king, the Bishop as bishop, the Farmer as farmer, the Knight as military leader, the Mason as worker in stone, the Merchant as collector and distributor of goods, the Money-Lender as Jew, but no one honoured simply as gentleman and dishonoured merely as workman. What is necessary is to show the effect of the loss of the Catholic medieval idea of functional distinction, as opposed to class distinction, upon the practice of the arts. And yet it must not be supposed that the idea of that time is something peculiarly either Catholic or medieval. It would be truer to say that it is simply humanly normal; that it was fostered by the Church rather than invented by her; that its almost complete victory was lost on account of sin and pestilence rather than by the uprising of other equally good and normal things.” - Eric Gill

“I alone take all things out of their sense and make them one in me” - Meister Eckhart

“And this is precisely what the artist does, whose first gesture is an interior and contemplative act in which the intellect envisages the thing not as the senses know it, nor with respect to its value, but as an intelligible form or species; the likeness of which he afterwards proceeds to embody in the material” - Ananda Coomaraswamy

“The ingredients of a work of art are both intangible and tangible. Into its making go such elusive elements as the artist's innate talent and inner vision – and also such mundane materials as pigments and glues and varnishes. In every generation the artist has had to harmonize the aesthetic act of painting with the physical act. But vital differences set apart the painters of Giotto's time from those of today. The amount of sheer sweat and toil they had to expend, the ingenuity they had to exercise in the use of tools and techniques, the complications they had to cope with to assemble their materials, all were incomparably greater than at any time since.

A modern painter has only to walk into the nearest supply store to find a profusion of ready-made aids at his disposal. Chemistry and technology have touched his sphere as all others. With no more exertion than reaching for his wallet, he can acquire canvas stretched to his specifications, boards already primed, swatch books of coordinated colour samples, synthetic paints that dry swiftly, and – if he finds the traditional sable or bristle brush too confining – sprays powered by an air turbine or realised at the push of a button.

Consider, by contrast, the labours required of Giotto and his contemporaries before they could even begin to paint. They had to cut their own wood panels and build their own frames, make their own brushes and drawing charcoals, grind their own pigments, and concoct their own pastes, sizes, mordants plus all the other mixtures necessary to prepare a painting surface or to affix the paints or to preserve them.” - Sarel Eimerl

'In a world where manufactured products and middlemen's service's were new economic notions, the artist often had to go at his task literally from the ground up. Cennini recalled that as a lad he prowled the Tuscan hills looking for natural pigments in the earth, and that at “a very steep place, scraping the steep with a spade, I beheld seams of many kinds of colour – ocher, dark and light sinoper, blue and white.” It was a practice not restricted to beginners. A century after Cennini, the mighty Michelangelo, seeking suitable reds and yellows for his Sistine Chapel frescos, took shovel in hand, so the story goes, and went down into the Pope's gardens behind the Vatican and, digging into the clay, found the ochers he desired.

Materials other than pigments also had to be sought out and tested, their drawbacks discovered. The knowing painter chose the easy-to-work poplar, linden or willow for his wood panels. For large brushes, he preferred the bristles of a domesticated white hog to those of a wild black hog. He used hard porphyry stone, instead of the softer marble, as a grinding-slab on which to pound and crush the lapis lazuli from which he extracted the most beloved of his colours, ultra marine blue. He drew on his own kitchen for mixing bowls, and exploited such familiar substances as garlic to make his mordants, burnt almond shells to make his blacks, and powdered chicken bones to prime his panels.' - Ibidem

"The producers and promoters of modern art form a veritable mafia that is made up of an international network of art galleries, museums, universities, critics and auction houses. Governments at the national and provincial levels also support this genre by subsidizing artists and related exhibitions, thus contributing to the distortion and imbalance of the masses. Art should elevate people's feelings, arousing in them appreciation and admiration for the beauty of classical forms and noble deeds. The so-called modern or contemporary art is nothing more than the manifestation of an unbalanced society uprooted from nature by the pretentious and perverse intellectuals of Gramscian formation who control the media and the educational system of our decadent society. So, it is used as a weapon of cultural degradation. The awareness of this is the duty of every good citizen and every lover of beauty and dignity."

~Claudio Lombardo