How Edward Lear might approach Art & Design
The business of Art, and indeed of Design – which sounds awfully like arranging furniture in a particularly picturesque fashion – is, to my mind, a most curious and delightful pursuit. One must, of course, begin with observation. Not the dry, calculating observation of, say, an engineer calculating the tensile strength of a bridge (though bridges have their own peculiar charm, I grant you), but the *observing* of the sort one does when one sees a Limbering Lark or a particularly plump Penguin. One notes the curve of its wing, the precise shade of its beak, the way it tucks its head under its wing when it dreams of utterly impossible things.
And so it is with Design. Is it not merely the elegant arrangement of the necessary? A chair, for instance, must certainly be for sitting, but must it not also be for looking at? And if it is for looking at, what shape might it take? Perhaps like a melancholy mushroom, or a very comfortable cloud. And Art! Ah, Art is the wilder cousin, the one who dances in the rain and tells stories of faraway lands where the mountains are made of plum pudding. It is the capturing of a fleeting feeling, the essence of a sneeze, the colour of a very old sock that has seen too much.
One should not, I think, be too terribly bound by the *rules* of these things. For if one is too bound, where is the room for a particularly splendid sort of Nonsense? And Nonsense, as I have discovered, can often be the most profound sort of sense. It might be so, or it might not be so, but the imagining of it, the sketching of it, the *being* of it – that is the wonderfully important part, don't you agree? And if it makes one smile, or even let out a small, delighted “Oh, what a wonderful sight!” then it is surely a success of the most splendid order.
Imagined perspective — an AI synthesis grounded in Edward Lear’s recorded ideas and methods, not a quotation or a statement they actually made.