The word refinement sometimes has a sense of something stuffy, chilly, or too delicate to touch, and yet in the world of design, refinement relates to that part of designing that brings things to a point of moving towards a better understanding and completing a clearer picture.
In essence it is the act of taking a sketch or an outline of an idea and refining it to bring it to a different level of completeness and quality by allowing the parts that were nebulous to be clarified. This act of refining is an interesting point for as we know there are many ways that “things” can be filled in! As had been said, “How creative do we want to get?”
Yet even as Michelangelo seemingly alluded to by his thoughts of “allowing the form within to come out” (“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free” Michelangelo )( see my earlier blog on Michelangelo), there would seem to be a pattern of fulfillment in design that comes by means without the struggle and without the fighting, almost as if it just begins to appear!
Many times we think that this place of non-struggle is a place that one gets to when one has been filled with all the knowledge of the masters and teachers, and that being filled, now one can create with the ease of say, Rembrandt!
Rembrandt Vin Rijn was born in 1606 at a time in history known as the Renaissance Era, a point of the beginning awakening of certain ones from a darker period of time, that also included such prior masters of design and creative endeavors as Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo.
Rembrandt it is told was 14 years of age by the time he started studying art and painting, moving into apprenticeships with the teachers of his era. By the time he was in his early twenties he had surpassed his teachers in his ability and skill with the deftness of his touches to the canvas, and actually began accepting students to teach.
Was this just another anomaly of talent that far outweighed his teachers in the Netherlands? Was this one that like the Great Ones before him, had been blessed by the Gods to excel before the throne of the accomplishments of mankind? Was he, as is sometimes stated, a self-made man?
Or perhaps as it might have been, that Rembrandt was given by his teachers and the ones before him, a sense of an outline, a sketch of a design, from which he chose to allow the refinement of a greater design to fill in the space!
If that was the case, then it would have taken a choice on his part and an effort to execute…not in a struggling kind of way, but mayhaps in way of seeing and hearing something that was not commonly known, but given to him to interpret individually. That something is always challenged by the world standards as we each of us has experienced in our own lives. We may never know for sure if that is what he heard, yet nature has a way of giving and receiving that comes from the core of things, and for each individual that would mean something personal and different, though always in relation to a part of a greater design. A little too wild? Hmmm.
Rembrandt’s life was filled with challenges that were pretty large as compared to most. Three of his 4 children died in infancy, and soon after his wife died. After a time he finally married again, only to lose his second wife to an early death, and still later, his son who passed away before him. By the end of his life, he had filed for bankruptcy and had lost most all of his material wealth. He died by 1669 at the age of 63.
Rembrandt is known to have been a prodigious painter and artist. Of the 2300 works that are assigned to his hands at this point, 600 are paintings, 300 are etchings, and 1400 are drawings. He also taught other artists all his life.
This was seemingly a man who moved with a larger sense of purpose than what the world wanted to give to him. He allowed his life to be filled in, not by the world’s standards, but in a way of hearing and seeing his talents reach their own level of fulfillment, in a sense, allowing that space to be refined from within, clearly bringing his sense of purpose closer to the reality of his capacity to create.
If we begin to hear and see that each of us have that same opportunity, then is there some way that we can we begin to recognize the sketches of our own lives and times? How could we begin to allow the fulfillment of our own levels of accomplishment, not by what the world thinks we need to do, but by allowing the same essence of Nature that the Great Ones did, from the very Source of our core?
Wouldn’t that be the point of what we are here to do?
Your comments are appreciated! Stay tuned!
Web Museum Rembrandt, http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/rembrandt/ nov 2010
Rembrandt images http://www.christusrex.org/www2/art/rembrandt.htm nov 2010
Rembrandt http://www.rembrandtprints.org/biography.html nov 2010
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