Two Chapters to Go in My Book: Evolution Through Art

Facing the World, Self-Portrait

Update 2, Evolution Through Art: A Psychological and Aesthetic Journey by Michael Newberry

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Horses Heads, Venus of Willendorf, and Lion Man, 40-35,000 BC

I hope everyone is doing okay in these early stages of quarantining. Heartbreaking. Around the start of it I came up with the concept to write this book on aesthetics. I am dividing my time painting, writing the book, and, it seems, washing dishes.

I am writing my first book: Evolution Through Art. I have written the Introduction, and the first two chapters, about 4,000 words. Good early reports back from my copy editor who is a rhetorician! It is a story of how art plays the leading role in our evolution. It is a journey of profound respect and gratitude to the evolutionary artists that had the minds, substance, and courage to follow their truth. Often they fought against tremendous opposition from practical reality, their own arguments, peer pressure, philosophies, religions, and psychologically-impotent sadistic authorities!

Book Idea: Psychological Aesthetics and the Exciting Fight to Evolve by Michael Newberry

Beyond Obstacles, Malevolence, and Ignorance 

Willendorf Venus c. 28,000 BCE – 25,000 BCE Discovere 1908 near Willendorf, by Josef Szombathy, Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria

I have been thinking about writing an art book filled with stories, anecdotes, speculation on prehistorical art, real life experiences, and the knowledge of what is it is like to strive for the sublime. Today I started with the title and listing chapter headings.

Psychological Aesthetics and the Exciting Fight to Evolve: Beyond Obstacles, Malevolence, and Ignorance

Chapters

1. Leaving One’s Mark: Taming Powerful Animals Through Capturing Them In Art
2. Imagining the Next Step: Willendorf Venus or I Will See You Later Tonight
3. Safety in Group Think, Their Fear of the Unknown and the Extent They Will Go Eradicate Evolutionary Nudges
4. Wisdom, Truth, and Courage Within: Calibrating Perception, Evaluation, and Emotion
5. To Be or Not To Be? To Break Free or to Conform?
6. Tears, Love, and Visibility: The Alternate Universe
7. The Art Instinct: What Makes Humans Unique Animals?
8. Art is the Power That Religion Wants: Control the Artists you Control the Mass Psyche
9. Art Transcends Agendas By Touching Individual Souls
10. Power Without Wisdom Corrupts Completely: Michelangelo in the Quarry; Postmodernist Malevolence 
11. Life or Death: Consequences of Integrity
12. Freedom of the Sublime

Newberry, Where No One Has Gone Before, 2018, oil on linen, 64×46″

Before Everything There Was Visual Art

Future of Art by Rick Barker, featuring the work of Michael Newberry

This was lecture by Rick hosted through the ICC Speaker Series on the Future of Art as he saw it and featured the work of Artist Michael Newberry. This was taped at the beautiful Creekstone Inn in Idyllwild, California, January 14th, 2016
Video 90-min

My dear friend Rick Barker gave this talk one year from passing away due to complications with Parkinson’s Disease. The talk is about my art and its context but from Rick’s perspective, a life long interest in human evolution. He wrote Transcending Evolution: A Christian Guide to Understanding, Accepting, and Transcending Evolution available at Amazon. I met him in the Idyllwild dog park when I first moved there. It was rewarding to be surrounded by sights, sounds, and smells of playful dogs, pines, and mountains, earthy dirt, and talk with him of philosophy and aesthetics. I lent him one of my paintings, Arabesque Series: Female Couple. He was terribly ill in the hospital in his last week and wanted to die at home, the next day he died; he was found on the floor with his head uplifted towards my painting.

Mediocrities Rebelling Against Evolution

The Sublime

The experience of the sublime is to be looked for in art. Art integrates senses, emotions, and thought. The sublime in art elevates our sensory experience, heightens and taps our emotional potential, and furthers our knowledge. The sublime in art can give us a moral to the story, a stance towards living. At its best, the sublime in art inspires awe in our human potential and gives us a path to evolve as a whole being and as a species.

Michael Newberry, Idyllwild, 11/25/2017

Newberry, Denouement, 1987, oil on linen, 54×78″

Figure the Future, 66 min

Figure the Future
By Michael Newberry
Presented by The Atlas Society, 2008

The premise of this talk is that the heroic and beautiful nude is contemporaneously linked with human evolutionary advancements.

The great nudes witnessed the development of individuals rights in politics, with reason replacing superstition in the humanities, and with authenticity of the human spirit rather than the status symbols of the ruled and rulers. It also was widely appreciated prior to the dawn of democracy and Greek developments of science, philosophy, and aesthetics; prior to the birth of art history, artist’s anatomy (under penalty of death if discovered doing autopsies in Michelangelo’s time); and prior to the replacement of monarchies with democracy.

0:17 Introduction by Robert Bidinotto

3:03 The Nude as the Personification of the Individual The Status of Clothed Figures Ramasus, Queen Elizabeth 1, Ingres, Millet, Whistler, Wyeth, Pearlstein, and Richter.

15:12 Individuality Expressed Through the Nude Courbet, Durer, Bellini, Boucher, Manet, and Renoir.

23:26 The Best Within-Many humans want a balance of happiness, beauty, wealth, health, and good relationships. One device artists developed was proportions of the human figure, a very hard-won technical milestone, to give us not a lesson but what a successful human stance looks like. First Artists to Sign Works, Polyclitus, Praxiteles, Humans as godlike.

27:39 Nude as Inspiration Michelangelo, Galileo, Joseph Dauben, Capuletti.

30:05 The Nude Adjacent to Moving Humanity Forward: Interesting Cultural Developments — Bridging Ancient Greece to the Renaissance – Orbit of Individuals Solon, Democracy, Aristophanes, Botticelli, Translation of Aristotle, Vasari (First Art Historian), Madame de Pompadour, Diderot, Manet’s Olympia, Hugo, Bizet, Copley, American Revolution, Mercy Otis Warren, Rossetti, Eakins, Walt Whitman, Emerson.

42:53 An Aside: Turning Leaves of Grass to Trash to Postmodern Art

44:18 Nazis and the Heroic Nude

45:43 Cultural Conflict — Sabotaging the State The Last Judgment, Heroic Nudes Create Conflict with Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Religions.

47:50 Where We Are Today Lucian Freud, Schipperheyn, Collins, and Feldman.

51:19 Q & A Roman Copies, Nudes Convey Individuality of Traits, Erotic Elements, Postmodernists are Grumpy People, Heroic Nude Helped to Defeat the Nazis? Humanism vs Christianity reflected in Renaissance Art, Courageous Figurative Artists, Nudes as Dangerous to Status Quo Cultures, Obscenity, Michelangelo’s Popular Appeal, Propaganda, and Appropriation of Great Art.

Michael Newberry lives in Idyllwild, California with his dog Frida. He has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Athens, and Rome. He shows at the White Cloud Gallery in Washington D.C. Follow him on Instagram at @artnewberry.