单选题 Poetry, said Robert Frost, is what gets lost in the translation, and in the week that the Turner prize was announced it is worth remembering that there are still people working at the sort of art which has something to be lost in the translation to fame. Hellen Gibart fell in love with oil painting when her sixth form teacher gave her a small canvas. "I"ve still got it upstairs. Oil painting has had a classic period and is being sidelined too much now, but I"m sure it will live through that. It can articulate things so specifically. I layer it, I build it, and I knock it or scrape it back. It"s like a sculpture, in a way: an attempt to get closer to the subject.
"I found it very diffcult initially, because it has a life and a spirit of its own that it can lead you to if you allow it and I never wanted to do any other material."
For the first part of her career she set herself to learn drawing as well. In the mornings she would teach English as a foreign language, and in the afternoons and evenings "just drawing, drawing, drawing. It wasn"t stuffy old evening classes: there was a lot of energy and it was very exciting. I knew I wanted to work and paint. I didn"t know anything about the art world."
After about five years of this life, a gallery where she had been working was closed, and she got a grant to go to Cyprus for a year. It was the first time she had ever been able to work full time as an artist.
And she loved it. She ended up living in the mountains. Nowadays she prefers Spain, because fewer people there speak English. On Cyprus, she say"s, everyone she knew spoke English so well that she could never break through into the Greek side of their lives, no matter how friendly they were.
This urge to push through and find what is really there seems to be the same feeling she has in front of a canvas. It is extraordinary how often artists talk as if what they were doing were finding or releasing something already there, rather than creating things themselves.
Sometimes she talks like a musician. "I don"t know if you ever, when you"re writing, feel what it is just not to be there: a blind wandering that isn"t a dead end, when you"re not hitting walls. I can spend weeks and weeks just mashing at canvas and then it will suddenly happen. Sometimes it"s an accident."
Her most recent studies were of a local collection of fossils—she lives in Suffolk, near Aldeburgh—and in her studio they seemed as agelessly fresh as the rocks, two or three hundred million years old, from which they had come. They seemed to have nothing in common with the lemony heat and stillness of the painting of a church interior in Spain, which was propped against another wall.
"I have never been able to support myself by selling paintings," she says, which has been the case for most artists this century. What changed for her generation (she is 44) was that the art schools started using specialist teachers rather than working artists. "It"s very sad. I think that practitioners teaching in the college are the only people who should be there. They understand the problems and—as a huge generalisation—educationalists don"t."
Her views on the Turnerish stuff are discriminating. "I thought Carl Andre"s bricks were extremely beautiful." She admires Damien Hirst. She had been to see the Turner show at the Tate and even enjoyed one of the video installations there. "But with a lot of the art that is being promoted now it seems to me that what is being sold is an idea, a formula. It is the idea rather than the substantiation which matters. And this means there is a question of charlatanism, when a few people can ride on the back of the ones who are genuinely involved. "And then her politeness cracks for a second or three.
"If I"m going to be radical or challenging it"s not acknowledged, because the form that I work in is old. That is very tiresome.
Perhaps it"s the price that must be paid for the art that conceals artiness.

单选题 The word "articulate" means ______.

单选题 According to Helen, who should be the teacher to teach in art school ______.

单选题 Among the following statements, which one is not true?

单选题 According to the passage, what is the recent condition of art?

单选题 What interests does Helen have in?