Why This Website?
Why Objective?
Why Art?
Why Not Abstract Art?
A Sense of Life
Why This Website?
From a very young age, I grew up watching my father (Valoy Eaton) destroy expensive art books.
My father was a professional artist who clearly knew the kind of realistic art that motivated him. So when he came across an art book that he liked, he counted the
number of pictures he called "keepers" that he wanted to add to his art file collection. He wanted to enjoy the art for himself without having to wade through pages
of commentary. He purchased the book, took it home, and with a razor blade extracted only the art work that he considered worthy of his collection and motivated him
to become a better artist himself.
After the razor blade had done its destructive work, the desecrated art book was left full of holes and hollow words where the pictures
used to be. The books still looked great on a shelf but would provide an unwelcome surprise to anyone who unwittingly took the book off the shelf and opened it expecting
to get anything out of it. Soon even keeping the hollow shells of these art books seemed like a waste of space so they were eventually sent to their final resting place in
a landfill somewhere. This was in the 1970's and 1980's before you could cheaply reproduce pictures using flatbed scanners, color copiers, or the internet. He figured that $1
was a fair price to pay for each picture. He was willing to pay the price of the book if it yielded enough art file pictures to add to his collection.
I have always loved books and considered a good book to be a lifelong companion. So I remember how horrified I was when my father had me take all of these ruined art books to
the dumpster. For my father it wasn't about the book. It was about the art, and he didn't want someone else interfering with his own judgment of the work, or trying to interpret
it for him. He wanted to be in charge of his own motivation. My father treated all of these pictures he had collected as one continual art show. The quality of an art show is just
as much determined by the works that get rejected as the ones that make it into the collection, so he made the pictures continually compete against each other for space in his
3-ring binders.
Now that I am older, I see his wisdom in cutting out the unessential and simplifying in order to stick to the real things that motivate. This website is not intended to be
an encyclopedia for all art genres. It is intended to be a means of publishing the best of Objective Art collected by my father over the years for the benefit of artists and art
lovers who share this same view of life.
Why Objective?
The term “objective” is used to describe the concept that something exists in reality independent of the consciousness of the observer. It is
based on Ayn Rand’s philosophy called "objectivism". An Objective Artist is
one who selectively recreates reality according to their value judgements. The public domain artists chosen to be included on this website were chosen for the
beautiful sense of life they portray in their work.
Why Art?
"Art is of passionately intense importance and profoundly personal concern to most men - and it has existed in every known civilization.1
Art is inextricably tied to man’s survival – not to his physical survival, but to that on which his physical survival depends: to the preservation and survival of his consciousness.2
The basic purpose of art is not to teach, but to show - to hold up to man a concretized image of his nature and his place in the universe.3
The greater the work of art, the more profoundly universal its theme."4
Why Not Abstract Art?
The following extract from an article posted by The Atlas Society entitled
"Why Art Became Ugly" discusses the rise of the modernist and postmodernist art movements:
"Until the end of the nineteenth century, art was a vehicle of sensuousness, meaning, and passion. Its goals were beauty and originality. The artist was a skilled master
of his craft. Such masters were able to create original representations with human significance and universal appeal. Combining skill and vision, artists were exalted beings
capable of creating objects that in turn had an awesome power to exalt the senses, the intellects, and the passions of those who experience them...
The break with that tradition came when the first modernists of the late 1800s set themselves systematically to the project of isolating all the elements of art and
eliminating them or flying in the face of them...By the beginning of the twentieth century, the nineteenth-century intellectual world's sense of disquiet had become a full-blown
anxiety. The artists responded, exploring in their works the implications of a world in which reason, dignity, optimism, and beauty seemed to have disappeared."
Ayn Rand described the rise of modern art in this way: "Disintegration is the keynote and goal of modern art. To reduce man’s consciousness to the level of sensation with no capacity to integrate them is the intention
behind the reducing of language to grunts, of literature to moods, of painting to smears, of sculpture to slabs, of music to noise."5
A Sense of Life
Man makes choices, forms value judgments, experiences emotions and acquires a certain implicit view of life. The integrated sum of a man’s basic values
is his sense of life.6 Every choice and value-judgment implies some estimate of himself and of the world around him…Whatever
the case may be, his subconscious mechanism sums up his psychological activities, integrating his conclusions, reactions, or evasions into an emotional sum…and
becomes his automatic response to the world around him…This is a sense of life.7 A sense of life always retains a profoundly
personal quality; it reflects a man’s deepest values; it is experienced by him as a sense of his own identity.8 Art is the voice
of his sense of life.
1: Ayn Rand – The Romantic Manifesto, p.3
2: Ibid., p.5
3: Ibid., p.10
4: Ibid., p.11
5: Ibid., p.68
6: Ibid., p.18
7: Ibid., p.15
8: Ibid., p.21
