Leisure's Relationship to Art

WE HUMAN BEINGS ought to make art - with all of its countless forms - a basic component of our leisure living! We should find more and better ways of discovering and appreciating art, of creating and producing art, and of sharing and protecting art and natural beauty.

These considerations are vital in our personal leisure - and they are equally important in our community enterprises. Our parks, for example, should be places of extreme beauty. These acres of green, many within miles of asphalt and the concrete jungles of our cities, should serve as an oasis for refreshment of the human spirit. Parks should hold high the purpose of preserving the beauties of nature amid man's exploration of it. If we allow our parks to be blemished; if we allow our landscapes to be spoiled by billboards; if we permit our rivers, streams, and lakes to be polluted by industrial waste; if we let our shorelines vanish, our wildlife disappear, and our mountains erode, great regenerating sources of endless natural beauty will be lost to us forever.

Why is it that we do not seek more beauty in the recreative use of our leisure? We won't find it in the rigid conforming world of work - but rather in the free expressive atmosphere of leisure. We can find it in nature, in the plant and animal life around us, in the land, sea, and sky. We will be able to find it in the music we create, or in the music which is created for us. It can be discovered in painting, or in sculpturing. We will even be able to find it in the written and spoken word - the means to that most wonderful of human possibilities: a relationship between people, sharing their thoughts, their lives, and their leisure.

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Adapted from thoughts by Charles Brightbill