Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for August 07, 2016

I’d agree.

Maybe this time, I’ll think to print this out an frame it.

A true nature lover. Much better than some old paint.

You can try, but you can’t put a frame around nature.

Frame a photo of the tree.Was that a painting of a relative?NY galleries recently threw away their old frames.A guy took them from the trash cans, sold them, & made a small fortune!!Galleries realized their mistake, too late.

“And poems are made by fools like me,but only God can make a tree.”(Joyce Kilmer)

I may not know much about art, but I know what they tell me I’m supposed to like.

Thank you! This isn’t art appreciation, it’s nature appreciation and a rejection of art.

I think Wiley is telling us to stop thinking that beauty is only to be found in museums, we can see it every day outside our window (unless you live in some place like NYC)….

I think it was time for his art appreciation to branch out into another direction.

That’s nice. But since you don’t need that painting Mona Lisa anymore, I’ll take it off your hands.

That just goes to show you not all comic strips need a punchline.

I remember thinking the same one time when I came out of the Royal Academy (an art gallery in London, England) and went into Green Park. I think this one’s been published before on this site. Is wiley on holiday – more power to him if he is – he’s the best cartoonist around IMHO, now that Gary Larson has retired? (I’m British in case you’re wondering, and no, I’m not happy about Brexit).

It’s not either-or.

I believe art is expressing our interpretations of reality, and pushing the boundaries of what we can see and do in this reality.

Normally artists make statements via their art. I think Wiley made an excellent statement.

One of my favorites, Mr. Wiley. Outstanding.

Hey Cliff, step back. More. More….

I think that I shall never seeA Poem as lovely as a tree.

Joyce Kilmer

Wiley,this is going to join my collection of your all time best strips

Beauty does not need to be framed.

Nature is often more beautiful than Art, but Nature isn’t Art. Nature simply IS. The very word “Art” means that the thing under consideration was created, or at the very least a conscious choice was made to define or display it.Yosemite Valley simply IS, and it’s beautiful. Ansel Adams chose where to place the camera (with what kind of lens and what type of film), under what lighting conditions, to create artifacts capturing particular images. You may prefer the landscape to the photographs of it, but the latter are Art and the former is not.The man in this cartoon is placing his view of the tree within the particular confines of the frame he is carrying. He has chosen this tree and that particular angle to compose a certain image that he is enjoying, even if will exist only in his memory where only he can enjoy it.What I’m saying is, the guy with the frame isn’t “appreciating” Art (again: Nature, however beautiful, isn’t Art); he’s CREATING Art.

Bruno: upon seeing the redwoods, what Reagan actually said was: “When you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.”

Fritzoid: Yosemite was home for nearly a decade, worked in the darkroom with Ansel, a great privilege indeed! The thing is, he worked out exactly what would appear in the negative and print, before he opened the shutter.

As to art and nature; I’m watching hummingbirds out my window and the artwork, and engineering, of nature is superlative. Interesting that in the Declaration of Independence, it’s “laws of nature, and nature’s God”, not the one created in the minds of Man in his image, that the writer admired. Never feared the laws of nature nearly as much as the ones in Leviticus- that define Man’s inhumanity to Man.

It takes a true Mainer to appreciate this.

Works for me!!

No shirt offer on this one?

Again, not denying the beauty (terrible or otherwise), just denying that it’s Art.If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to interpret it as a metaphor for hubris, impermanence, or human mortality, it isn’t Art. If someone draws the fallen tree, if only because it fell at a picturesque angle, that’s Art (regardless of the aestheitic quality of his drawing).

This is a rerun. A good one, but still a rerun.

A Master work.