Is Beauty Frivolous
I went to graduate school in the 1990's and earned an MFA in painting.
I was taught by a now outmoded paradigm; break them down and build them back up in your own image. Who's image you might ask?
For me it was many of my art professors.
Emotion and beauty were not discussed. In fact it was strongly discouraged.
My whole MFA experience can be summed up in the words of Art Critic Jeremy Gilbert, "beauty is what serious artists want to get beyond as quickly as possible when discussing works of art.”
What a disservice.
In fact, I spent years after completing my MFA soul searching, re-educating, and finally settling into a view that first discerned what really mattered to me, then going after it with all my heart.
I then began to create and integrate the spiritual, sublime and beautiful within the mystery of life.
This is where I felt most of home and where my authenticity is birthed from.
If we really spend some time understanding the predecessors to minimalism and conceptualism in art and their impulse to create, the intelligence of beauty and emotion is at their core.
One of the most important Abstract Expressionist painters and artists of the twentieth century, painter Mark Rothko, makes reference to these foundations in his writings(The Artist Reality Philosophies of Art ) stating:
"The perception of beauty is definitely an emotional experience. Beauty conforms to the demands of the spirit. The experience of beauty may also be a sign of the reception of the creative impulse."
He goes on to allude that we need far more than technique to create good works of art;
"Skill itself is not an index to beauty. Of course, the artist must have sufficient means at his command to achieve his objective so that his work becomes convincingly communicative. But clearly it is something else which the art must communicate more than this before its author is seated among the immortals."
Peeling back our top layered skin and letting people see us.
That is where soul shines through.
Or as writer Anne Lamont so craftily says- " Trappings and charm wear off... let people see you."
Since we’re all connected... why would we not.
And since this seems to be a post full of quotes I will end with my favorite poet Mark Nepo who always so carefully excavates the soul in the most stunningly beautiful manner;
“Regardless of how we get there, no matter what is broken or lost, the weave is what binds us. We call its pattern beauty."
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Warmly, and fondly,
thank you for reading,
