Word: transcendentalist
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...transcendentalist, Thoreau saw spirit at the heart of matter. But he was never so genteel as to gag at reality. "Let a man reserve a good appetite for his peck of dirt," he wrote, "and expect his chief wealth in unwashed diamonds." At 23, Thoreau was already grappling with the central dilemma of his life, how to know himself and be himself under the raised eyebrow of conformist society: "It is always easy to infringe the law-but the Bedouins of the desert find it impossible to resist public opinion...
...Here . . ." From death, that sunken rock of an abstraction, Wights painted ideas ripple out to include what he calls "the transitoriness lite. Now we're here, now we're not." Says he: "I suppose that I would have been a good transcendentalist 100 years ago." He often paints water, finding in its unresting ebb and flow an almost obsessive symbol for the tides of time. On occasion, as in his stormy Clock (see cut) time, tide and the implied threat of shipwreck build together into a powerful unity. At other times he uses a huge winter-stripped, decaying...
...canvases strike right through the retina to the mind. Yet whether his pictures are sufficiently rich in color, firm in drawing and subtle in composition to live beyond the grave is another question. Masterpieces generally are constructed either with the utmost care and polish or else with what Transcendentalist Emerson himself called "nerve and dagger." Wight is too self-conscious to be really bold, too rushed to polish much...
...living man. He has been a foreign correspondent in China, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for his dispatches from Moscow. But like one of his own intellectual heroes, Henry Thoreau, Atkinson is happiest close to nature or working with his hands. Ask his religion and he answers: "Transcendentalist...