OTAGO ART SOCIETY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 27211, 14 October 1949, Page 9

OTAGO ART SOCIETY

SKETCH GROUP’S MEETING

A meeting of the Sketch Group of the Otago Art Society was held on Monday night Those present brought with them articles which they either liked or disliked intensely, each person giving the reasons for his opinion. The articles ranged from a carving in Oamaru stone to a necklace of greestone charms. The guest speaker for the evening w: s Mr W. Firth, who spoke on “Art in Relation to Modern Life." As a non-artist, Mr Firth said he regarded art as a human function and was concerned with its effect on the world As the world was by no means static, any worthwhile function should be dynamic in nature and while the'fundamentals of art were static, the expression they found could be infinitely varied and dynamic. The function of an artist, then, was to use the basic materials, and by his treatment of these to provide a new experi-To-day moral and religious values had been badly shaken. In a topsy-turvy world, the abstract painter might be trying to express the needs of his generation. Mr Firth stressed that the danger of exaggeration existed in all new forms of expression, and if carried to excess the resultant work was equivalent to that of a lunatic, in having a message for one man only—its creator.