It has been a while since I last featured contemporary artists who I think are not only very good, but very much in the European tradition. As I often say, there is still a lot of great art being created; it is just that one will not find it in the mainstream, where everything is based upon the deconstruction of ethnically European cultural heritage, and nothing outside of the mainstream's underlying ideology will be given the oxygen of publicity. One must rely on friends on social media and such to bring artists of note to my attention, and I, in turn, try to give them a bit of publicity in some small way. I must stress that I do not know any of the artists personally, nor their political opinions. I of course hope that they have the sort of political opinions that are conducive to a culture in which their art can thrive.
Largely considered an American artist, Thomas Cole (1801-1848) of the Hudson River School of artists was actually born in Lancashire along with his also talented artist sister Sarah. Thomas painted landscapes and scenes from myth and history and has been criticised by Leftist academia for his Eurocentrism. One notices this pseudo-intelligentsia never accuse Negro painters of Afrocentrism in the same way: Afrocentrism is always to be celebrated as an intrinsic good and Eurocentrism as an intrinsic evil in the anti-White quasi-religious zealotry of what passes for academia. In fact, Cole also painted American Indians, but was always conscious of preserving their distinctiveness and otherness apart from White Europeans, although this is viewed neither as a positive nor a negative, but left merely as a statement of fact. The Leftist establishment have also considered this problematical, but it reveals their bigotry. If a white artist portrays them how they are, he is guilty of "othering"; if he portrays them as more civilized in a European sense, he is guilty of colonialism.
John Ruskin (1819-1900) is an important and much-neglected philosopher by Rightists. A huge influence on the Pre-Raphaelites, he was concerned largely with the philosophy of art from a Rightist viewpoint and in a practical sense in its effects upon civilization and society. One of the most neglected subjects in art in the contemporary age is aesthetics, and Ruskin's essays provide a great insight into why aesthetics is important and why the Left so wishes to debase that which is beautiful. Here, he refers to the "false Puritans", just as I have referred to Leftism as the Puritanism of Perversity, especially in the anti-art of Marina Abramovich. I, of course, do not share his opinion on the good moralising effect of Christianity, but he is correct in that modernity and wealth has brought brokenness and corruption, and that the moral state of society is reflected in its art, just as he is correct that "the truly great nations nearly always begin from a race possessing
this imaginative power". An accomplished artist himself, I have interspersed the essay with a few of his works.
