Among the arts, music has been, is now, and perhaps always will be, my primary interest, my "one true love."  It is music alone that can calm my fretful spirit, fill it with thundrous power, buoy it to ecstasy, plunge it into crushing despair, and revive it with a breath of glorious hope.

However, my belatedly blooming interest in other art forms, and in the cultures they portray and represent, has prompted me to expand the Classical Music section of this web site to include those other varieties of aesthetic expression so uniquely characteristic of the human species and spirit.

I am not myself an artist in any sense (unless one considers idle wordsmithing an art).  Yet I find the quality of human life profoundly affected by art in its wondrous and vital variety.  Indeed, it is probably fair to say that, along with philosophy and science, art stands among those distinguishing activities which clearly define and enoble the human species.

I suppose I had always felt a mysterious attraction to the wonder that is art—both the beautiful and the grotesque.  My grandfather, though not an original artist, became a fairly accomplished amateur copyist, and the products of his labors continue to adorn the walls and warm the hearts of family generations succeeding him.  Until recently, though, I was the typical pedestrian art-fan, who "knows what he likes," but is in most respects naïve, even grossly ignorant, about that which so bewitches sense and spirit alike.  I would occasionally visit a museum and find myself delighted and entertained on a superficial level, but never really able to experience the full captivation of an artwork, when it penetrates beyond the viewer's retinas and takes hold of his psyche, linking it to that of the artist.

When I belatedly began to devote some study to painting, sculpture, and architecture, I was astonished to find that I was already somewhat more knowledgeable than I had supposed; even my fairly modest background in history and foreign travel, it seems, had already furnished a skeletal framework, upon which the art of the ages spontaneously arranged itself into recognizable patterns, corresponding to the styles, beliefs, and events of various periods and cultures.

I find that I have definite (if still modestly developed and exercised) tastes.  I gravitate toward certain of the Impressionists—particularly Monet and Morisot—and the ingenious ways in which they used patterns of color and light to project an image or a feeling—not onto canvas, but into the very mind of the viewer himself!  Even so, I find much to absorb and savor in the art of other cultures and periods, not only as an appreciation of art itself, but also as an insightful adventure to the artist's personal milieu.  I have begun to explore the roots of my tastes, the fascinating ways in which one human mind can communicate—even without words—across vast gulfs of culture, belief, distance, and time.  As an introvert, I have long felt somewhat estranged from the rest of humanity, yet with art I can feel it embrace me across the seas and the ages.

Like life itself, art is an adventure of sensation and emotion and mind.  Most of all, it is communication.  If only we make an earnest effort to connect with art, it will in turn connect us with all else in human experience and imagination, from ancient to current, assuring even the humblest among us that we are part of that greater living entity we call mankind.  If one could find no other reason for existence, art would supply it.

=SAJ=