Aubrey Beardsley, Clifford Brown: Drawing from the Cosmic Plenum of Artistic Inspiration, Let's Say

To achieve what Aubrey Beardsley did in his brief 25 years of life, may only be possible if one knows they simply won't live very long at all, and so they had better get to mastering their will and bending all their time and energy towards producing Just Precisely the sort of artWork that is so singular to their doomed soul and heart, lung tissue, cards, etc.


I knew he died young, but he was apparently tubercular from an early age so was aware of his own death sentence, which is what that disease meant at that time. Off-hand i can only think of a few other master artists who are comparable: like Clifford Brown, Rimbaud, Charlie Parker. It's...unreasonable... to achieve such greatness as they all did in that short a span of Human time. It's somehow more divine than human, though the depth of that distinction is arguable. My personal suspicion is that people like these are touched by and interpret some eternal force of Creation, Inspiration. They draw from the art spirits and lessons that are only available through tapping the akashic records, or something like this. The work they do is not entirely theirs. This may be even more the case with the musicians, as i don't necessarily feel they create the notes and harmonies themselves, quite as much as the writer and painter/illustrator/sculptor bring into being their own lines, phrases, forms. The notes are already out there, the harmonies may be universal... Music is like channeling, and the other forms of art perhaps more like studied, ceremonial magic. In any case the work of practice required, the sheer sacrifice of time and human contact, is the rub. Clifford, Bird, Aubrey, and John Coltrane gave up huge portions of their precious social humanity, you could say, to master their instruments, pens, brushes, and Music as they did. And they did it as much for us and for Humanity, as for themselves...

We should probably all have some of the work of Beardsley in our homes, among our other treasured gewgaws and artworks. His stunning and in so many ways perfect visions are enlightening, they're enriching. They're totally fearless, unique manifestations of his particular, beautiful, original being, mind and soul. Could he have produced masterworks in such embarrassing profusion as he did without Death as his own private proctor? Did Clifford know he was going to die young? The world of art may have never seen anyone quite as original as Beardsley, and may never again. Nobody has ever played like Clifford, Bird or Trane, and despite countless inspired, feverish attempts that continue to this day, nobody ever will. If you get off this earth and out of this body without ever savoring be-bop music and its later forms as represented by Brown, Coltrane, and also Woody Shaw, for tragic further instance, then you've missed out horribly.


AVB: "He was a freak, as his contemporaries recognized."

"Last summer, i struck for myself an entirely new method of drawing and composition. Words fail to describe the quality of the workmanship. The subjects were quite mad, and a little indecent. Strange, hermaphroditic creatures wandering about in period costumes. Quite a new world of my own creation....Behold me then, the coming man, the rage of artistic London. The admired of all schools, the besought of all publishers, the subject of articles."