"I like the Arts better than nature"

I wouldn't schlep all the way to Amsterdam to see fields of tulips! art every time.The wonderful Reiksmuseum.

Actually I do like tulips, which begs a question here.... I particularly like tulips by the time they go all bendy in the vase with a petal or two falling off ( maybe because it looks like a still life?)However the ones that I have bought this year have not done this! they have remained as stiff as ramrods and just faded and died.

Possibly the vase you have them in is too tall?

Good point that, it's not technically a tulip vase, but I shall try a smaller one.

Art. It doesn't give me hay fever.

Apparently if you push a pin through (and don't leave it there like I did the first time!) the stem just below the tulip head it stops them drooping.......

"Now nature is not at variance with art...: art is the perfection of nature....nature hath made one world, and art another." Religio Medici

(Couldn't remember it all, so had to look it up!)

Despite being a gardener, I would head for the art galleries every time. So many Dutch masters were inspired by art. The best of both worlds.

The bulb fields are perhaps not a good reference point, as to me, they are not Nature. Offer me a picnic by a stream with a small waterfall, in a glade filled with wild flowers, and I would be there like a shot on a sunny day.

Really hard! I refuse to choose.

stop eating them jingl?

Can't we have both?

I do, I think. I go to art galleries a lot, and I love the countryside around me. However there are a lot of people who hate the countryside unless it is carefully placed behind a fence, and probably just as many who never go to an art gallery. I have had friends to stay who have been petrified of the darkness, the bendy roads, the wildlife, uneven ground, and no phone signal. I excitedly showed some friends an adder in the woods and when I turned around, couldn't see them for dust! I also have friends who won't go to Norwich where there is currently an amazing art exhibition on at the university, full of very famous paintings on loan for a few months.

Enjoy both...anything that brings pleasure and adds to life.

Yes. I enjoy both. My actual point was/is, if you are unable to see beauty in nature, can you see it in anything, including art? Isn't beauty beauty, wherever it is found?

A landscape view makes my heart sing. I am not talking renowned beautiful views, but just a view across landscape. Today I was at Stokesay Castle in Shropshire and I just looked out of one of the high windows across the fields and valley behind it and my heart lifted.

Art I struggle with. I have done art appreciation pictures, my walls are covered in pictures, none of them make my heart sing.

I do get it from some pictures, flickety.

Yes jings. Beauty is beauty, but very subjective and individual. A friend was complaining about a beautiful modern painting in her dining room a friend gave her for her wedding that would sell for thousands, as she is well-known. She preferred some brightly coloured paintings of houses by a street artist in Malaga and had bought three, what I would call folk art. I kept quiet and wished I could have the one she was complaining about - a giant wave crashing on the beach, you could see the movement and the colours were beautiful.

This thread has reminded me of a favourite poem

Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife:
Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art:
I warm’d both hands before the fire of Life;
It sinks; and I am ready to depart.

Walter Savage Landor

The first line worth remembering sometimes on Gransnet

Oh! That poem was in a book called "Arthur Mee's Book of One Hundred Beautiful Things" which I used to borrow from the library time after time, when I was a young teenager. Surprising how many I can remember.

Well, you could say the first line would be rather insulting to Gransnetters. Quite apart from the fact that it would make for some very dull boards.

An excellent poem, though.

I liked it in the days of my youth. I'm not so keen on it now though. #sodthat