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The profanity of paint cover

The profanity of paint

Chapter 18: 17. The Middle-class
By William Kiddier
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ArtPhilosophy & Ethics

About This Book

A collection of short, reflective essays by a painter that privilege romantic vision and intuition over technical realism, treating colour as a mutable, almost spiritual force beyond pigments. Through meditations on trees and the limits of representation, the author argues that literal training and excessive knowledge can stifle true artistic feeling, and he champions silence, poetic language, and personal temperament as essential to creation. Individual chapters address rhythm, relation, critics, the middle class, extravagance, tragedy, genius, and the idea of a masterpiece, concluding with moral reflections on the artist’s mission and the tension between perception and portrayal.

17. The Middle-class

THAT I belong to the middle-class is my chief misfortune; it is better to be born an aristocrat, but better still an artisan. To the middle-class belong all the money makers: builders of monopolies, political wire-pullers, and all that spells greed. These people buy everything and sell everybody. With them lying is an art, whereas for the poor it is only a pastime. The aristocrat—the product of luxury and idleness—is as much above any mean action as he is at loss in managing his own affairs. He must employ agents: enter the middle-class! To them he entrusts all his worldly belongings, with an intuitive knowledge that he is robbed always and will be as long as he lives. He knows they pursue his money with all the zest that he pursues sport. But he always carries the same bright face, the same kind heart; and he would pay to the last penny. O but how strange, his agents save him from ruin! and the people on the land contribute more to the miserable business than is known to my lord, more than they themselves ever realise: and so the middle-class remains the back-bone of the Empire. But what does this mean? The truth is that God made the lord and the labourer: the rest is mainly the work of the devil!