In conversations over the past few days, I noticed some statements people made about beauty.
- An interior designer said that beauty can improve the world.
- A teacher said that exposure to beauty could reliably do more good than acts of social action.
- A priest quoted Pope John Paul as saying: "It is...necessary to create lifestyles in which the quest for truth, beauty, goodness and communion with others for the sake of common growth are the factors which determine...choices..."
Digging a little into my remembered store of aphorisms from the sufi poet Rumi, I remember one in particular: "Let the beauty you love be what you do." It's a particularly apt aphorism for an artist, who is presumably charged with creating beauty. But I need more proofs.
I see nature as being able to create beauty that is so exquisite in its detail. The beautiful array of colors and variety of pattern on a beach far exceed what an artist could create. I look at what nature has created, and feel the inadequacy of what I can create with paint and brush.
Another problem is the tendency in our culture to turn beauty into a commodity. The artist may enjoy the creation of beauty as a process--but the commodification of that created thing is not lovely. A philanthropist in our town is spending millions of dollars buying art which is loaned out to a local museum. The paintings being purchased have an intrinsic value because of their beauty, and an extrinsic value as investments. I calculated that one of the paintings on recent exhibit, a Monet, was purchased for about $2 million. As I gazed at this painting, was I engaged in worship of beauty or wealth?
Beauty is a subjective thing. History and commerce elevate beautiful people, beautiful destinations, and beautiful art. But when the philosophers speak of pursuing truth, beauty and goodness, what they really must be referring to is the human capacity to appreciate beauty in many contexts. When we can see the beauty in the face of an elderly friend, in the pattern of worn paint on the side of a building, and in a teenager's quirky sense of humor, we feel love, interest and connection. When we make a choice to focus on ugliness: political corruption, pollution, people's shortcomings, we disempower our goodness. An aphorism that I know to be true from my work as an artist is: we are what we pay attention to. It must be that by paying attention to beauty we awaken love and connectedness to others.
This is the first time I have tried to understand why beauty must be important. I still remain unconvinced that the beauty I have the capacity to create can actually serve others.
3 comments:
Martha,
Your post really intrigues me, probably because this very question - "What is the essence of beauty?" - is at the heart of much of my own life & work. In fact, I launched an exploration of this whole sphere in my own blog: The Beauty Dialogues, so I do understand the apparent contradictions and complexity of the topic.
The way I look at it, there is a creative process which I am part of whether or not I know it. Sometimes I do know it, and feel my connection with that original pattern of perfection, that beauty which is so often reflected in and associated with nature. Other times I too can feel separate and imagine I will never 'create' anything like the magnificent works of art from the past, or the beauty that nature so effortlessly displays. In a sense I'm right when I feel that way, since the separated 'I' can't create anything... but on the other hand it's sort of a distortion of reality, imagining myself to be less than who I really am.
I was also interested in another point you brought up, about the classic philosophic ideas of beauty... I agree with the direction you are heading - that the ability to apprehend beauty is itself an expression of beauty, but I think there is something even more fundamental to notice here... and that is the fact that we can recognize beauty in others or in the world around us because we ARE beauty. When we see beauty in the world we are seeing the essential truth of ultimate perfection that is our birthright.
I might be getting pretty far 'out there' for most people about now :-), but I thought I'd share some of the responses I had to your post anyway, because I really do think this is an important topic.
I had a look at some of your art, just for curiosities sake, and loved what I saw. You are certainly one of the carriers of beauty in this world!
Blessings,
Amy
Dear Amy:
Thank you for your comment. I visited the Beauty Dialogues and found many interesting connections there. I still feel very uncertain about the Artist's role in beauty. The varieties of art are as infinite as leaves; what is fair to some is foul to others. It all does seem to relate to our habit of how we pay attention, and about the lures that draw our attention. Beauty exists, without any effort on our part. We can practice meditation and create beauty like the tree creates leaves. But we humans are meddlesome: we want to create beauty, and then we want someone to pay attention to it, and then we create suffering when we evaluate beauty in a comparative way. But I agree with you, I think there is some deep knowledge to be learned in beauty.
Martha,
I love these questions. Thanks for engaging with me in them.
I agree with you about the conundrum of creative expression from the 'I' perspective; when we are self-identified artists with individual egos we almost inevitably experience the kind of tensions you describe - of evaluation and comparison, struggle with the need for recognition and appreciation, etc. But this doesn't have all that much to do with the absolute nature of beauty. Rather, it's our relative process playing itself out.
Luckily there is another way to 'play' within the sphere of beauty... and many of us (looking at your work, I'm sure this is true for you) have the experience as artists where we lose ourselves in the creative flow, and what comes from us in those times is not 'ours' in the same way. It is a more organic encounter with another way of seeing, where the wholeness of beauty comes into play and the societal norms for 'beauty' don't seem to factor in...
Art is not in itself the same as beauty, although sometimes art is indeed beautiful. I think maybe one way to say it is that art comes from human expression, while beauty is beyond the human.
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