"When I was not building, I kept working on the sculptures, the stained glass windows, the mosaics for Pacem, and I began to feel more and more closely related to the craftsmen of ages past: the masons, the wood- and stone-carvers, the icon-makers of centuries ago, the cathedral builders of the Middle Ages — even, all the way back, to those Cro-Magnons of Altamira and Lacaux who, thirty thousand years ago, painted murals on the rock walls of their caves.
"It was as if I were taking a crash course on what the art impulse is really about: an art that is neither luxury, nor show-off, nor merchandise to be sold in shops called galleries, and even less a hobby. Art must be something that arises from regions fathoms deeper than the empirical ego, from the deeper recesses of the human Spirit. It must spring from its maker's truth, his core, if it is to touch the core, the truth of the one who confronts it. Art does not seek to preach, to shock or to charm. It is not even too concerned about being liked. It can't help being what it is.
"Kafka tells about a craftsman who is building a table and reflects on his making of that table as being a nothing, a nothing that is everything. This is what the cave painters may have felt when they painted those majestic animals on their rock walls, and the carvers of the lintels and capitals of Chartres and Vezelay, the Crucifix of Perpignan, the reclining Buddha of Anaradhapura. What these artists were carving was that 'No-Thing' that is all that matters.
" 'Art is not to express personality, but to overcome it,' wrote T.S. Eliot. Any Bach fugue confirms it. It is not a Mr. Bach expressing himself; it is the Unnameable expressing Itself through Johann Sebastian.
"To proclaim oneself 'an artist' is preposterous. To be an 'artist' is not an occupation, as being a plumber, a baker, or a doctor is an occupation. It is even less a hobby.
" 'Artist' is an honorific. It fits Rembrandt, Rafael, Rodin, Manzu — they fully merit the honorific, as do innumerable unknowns who through the ages were authentic artists. Others who neither draw, paint, nor play an instrument can let the artist-within shine through unmistakably. The true artist is the artist-within, the Mensch within, expressing him/herself, despite all fashions, as authentically as one's DNA, EKG, or thumbprint. Looking at a Paul Klee — with whom I feel no real contact — I recognize at once his expression of the true artist-within.
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