As disciples of Andrea Verrocchio we believe that the act of observing is the most important practice of art. The future of humanity depends upon our reactions to the world about us, for which we are largely dependent on sight. Up till 1900 art was exclusively concerned with the world about us. Artists have long been aware that our brains have become frozen in abstract terms which makes it hard for us to see truly what is out there.
Over the centuries artists have devised a series of practices that help us to bypass the human brain’s strong impulse to categorize and therefore not to see truly. The Museum of Artists’ Secrets is part of the Centre. It shows us how artists have tricked the brain and got round the problems of seeing truly. Art Historians, blissfully unaware, don’t see the problems, nor can they even recognise the solutions when they are presented with them.
In the past artistic achievements have steadily opened our eyes to the glorious richness of nature and humanity’s place in it. Now is not the time to abandon the exercise of seeing nature when that very richness is under threat from the our own activities and the computer seems to be dulling our responses to human expression through body language. A photographic record is not enough because the camera bypasses the assimilation process found in drawing, which requires practice and patience.
We uphold the need for practice and patience in a world of art that increasingly seems to be sliding into the abyss; squandering millennia of slow visual evolution as it goes. Visual evolution is slow because mankind all too easily loses the sense of where we are going. There have been many periods of decadence such as ours before, though none so extreme. Not only have the most visible artists lost all sense of the great tradition of seeing but the museums busy themselves with obliterating the pictures in their charge with ill-educated, incompetent “restoration”.
Come to Verrocchio and learn to see nature and the history of art more truly. Now, more than ever before, it is necessary to train the brain to see what is going on!
(see why www.saveRembrandt.org.uk)