Art as an Avenue of Beauty

Silent Lake, Ontario, watercolor ©A. Rutherford

Today I am thinking about the strong desire I have now to paint, probably because I just received some new art materials through UPS.  For the longest time, while I was heavily involved in my teaching career, my painting had to be kept to the margin of my life, and it was a narrow margin at that.  But still my early training in art had given me the artist’s eye through which to look at the world around me, and that was a wonderful gift, even if I couldn’t practice my art-making.  [more about the artist’s eye in a later post]

The modernist view of art is that it has no necessary relationship to Beauty, as we learned in the lectures by Roger Scruton in this post.  [And I would encourage anyone to take the time to view Scruton's program on BBC, Why Beauty Matters, especially people of Faith.]


However, the primary reason I think I am attracted to painting is because it is an avenue to appreciating, participating in, and communicating the beauty I see around me.

Beauty is a God-gift to us humans, and seeing it in any form it takes gives us pleasure, if our spirits are in harmony with it, and it is so various in the forms that it takes that we have many avenues for pleasure and delight.

"Beauty in art is the delicious notes of color one against the other. It is just as fine as music and it is just the same thing, one tone in relation to another tone. Real sentiment in art comes as it does in music from the way one tone comes against another independently of the literary quality of the subject - the way spots of color come together produces painting. . . . . . There are just so many tones in music and just so many colors but it's the beautiful combination that makes a masterpiece."

taken from Hawthorne On Painting, Charles Hawthorne

Kalil Gibran, writing about Beauty in The Prophet, describes a dream of meeting a muse in the forest:

After a deep silence, mingled with sweet dreams, I asked, "Speak to me of that beauty which the people interpret and define, each one according to his own conception; I have seen her honored and worshipped in different ways and manners."

She answered, "Beauty is that which attracts your soul, and that which loves to give and not to receive. When you meet Beauty, you feel that the hands deep within your inner self are stretched forth to bring her into the domain of your heart. It is the magnificence combined of sorrow and joy; it is the Unseen which you see, and the Vague which you understand, and the Mute which you hear - it is the Holy of Holies that begins in yourself and ends vastly beyond your earthly imagination."

Then she approached me and laid her scented hands upon my eyes. And as she withdrew, I found myself alone in the valley. When I returned to the city, whose turbulence no longer vexed me, I repeated her words:

"Beauty is that which attracts your soul, and that which loves to give and not to receive."

So yes . . . Beauty attracts my soul . . . in poetry, in music, in painting, in Nature, in relationships, in Solitude . . . my spirit is constructed that way, and I do not want to lose sight of it, which is easy to do in modern society.

Seeking Beauty

Cold winds can never freeze, nor thunder sour

The cup of cheer that Beauty draws for me

Out of those Azure heavens and this green earth --

I drink and drink, and thirst the more I see.

To see the dewdrops thrill the blades of grass,

Makes my whole body shake; for here's my choice

Of either sun or shade, and both are green --

A Chaffinch laughs in his melodious voice.

The banks are stormed by Speedwell, that blue flower

So like a little heaven with one star out;

I see an amber lake of buttercups,

And Hawthorn foams the hedges round about.

The old Oak tree looks now so green and young,

That even swallows perch awhile and sing:

This is that time of year, so sweet and warm,

When bats wait not for stars ere they take wing.

As long as I love Beauty I am young,

Am young or old as I love more or less;

When Beauty is not heeded or seems stale,

My life's a cheat, let Death end my distress.

by William Henry Davies


Joe Paquet is a contemporary traditional landscape painter who does not share the "modern" sensibility that art has no relationship to beauty.  Here's a short video in which he shares his thoughts about his goals in the creation of his paintings.  You begin the day with Joe in his home town of St. Paul, Minnesota, as he stops to pick up his requisite cup of coffee to get his juices flowing.  Then on to the studio, where he explains that he views his work as a "tapestry of color and value, and what I'm trying to do is to intuitively orchestrate it in a beautiful way, and create a harmony with it . . . and when you combine the beauty of observation and the differences in each day, the beautiful things that make everything so exquisitely different, and do it in a way that you feel it intensely, then you have a chance to leave something behind. . . . Everything we are for better or worse is in our work.  Part of getting better as a painter is developing as a human being."


Of course, those are wise words whether the "art" you are practicing is painting or homemaking or accounting or educating or being a friend.  But getting more in tune with your creative nature, as I hope continuing posts in my cyber-journal will illustrate, can aid you in developing your ability to see . . . no matter where you are looking . . . and increase the joy of sight.

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