Throughout the history of the arts, the nature
of creativity has remained constant to artists. No matter what objects they
select, artists are to bring forth new forces and forms that cause change—to
find poetry where no one has ever seen or experienced it before.
Landscape(風(fēng)景) is another unchanging
element of art. It can be found from ancient times through the 17th-century
Dutch painters to the 19th-century romanticists and impressionists. In the
1970s Alfred Leslie, one of the new American realists, continued this practice.
Leslie sought out the same place where Thomas Cole, a romanticist, had produced
paintings of the same scene a century and a half before. Unlike Cole who
insists on a feeling of loneliness and the idea of finding peace in nature,
Leslie paints what he actually sees. In his paintings, there is no particular
change in emotion, and he includes ordinary things like the highway in the
background. He also takes advantage of the latest developments of color
photography(攝影術(shù)) to
help both the eye and the memory when he improves his painting back in his
workroom.
Besides, all art
begs the age-old question: What is real? Each generation of artists has shown
their understanding of reality in one form or another. The impressionists saw
reality in brief emotional effects, the realists in everyday subjects and in
forest scenes, and the Cro-Magnon cave people in their naturalistic drawings of
the animals in the ancient forests. To sum up, understanding reality is a
necessary struggle for artists of all periods.
Over thousands
of years the function of the arts has remained relatively constant. Past or
present, Eastern or Western, the arts are a basic part of our immediate
experience. Many and different are the faces of art, and together they express
the basic need and hope of human beings.
1.
Leslie's paintings are extraordinary
because_______ .
A. they are
close in style to works in ancient times
B. they look
like works by 19th-century painters
C. they draw
attention to common things in life
D. they depend
heavily on color photography
2.
What is the author's opinion of artistic
reality?
A. It will not
be found in future works of art.
B. It does not
have a long-lasting standard.
C. It is
expressed in a fixed artistic form.
D. It is
lacking in modern works of art.
3.
What does the author suggest about
the arts in the last paragraph?
A. They express
people's curiosity about the past.
B. They make
people interested in everyday experience.
C. They are
considered important for variety in form.
D. They are
regarded as a mirror of the human situation.