The Beauty We Do

The garden of my 90 year old mother

"Let the Beauty you love be what you do."  -Rumi

Below are some more thoughts from Joe Paquet, the contemporary traditional landscape painter from yesterday’s post.  But of course, few of us are painters.  However, that doesn’t preclude us from working to develop our sense of awareness of the beauty that lies around us, what Joe calls “a personal sense of vision that is authentic and individual.”

He explains in an interview that “there are certain aspects to making art that are germane to all of us.” 

And I agree . . . I think that his thoughts in this interview do indeed pertain to us all.  Why?

Because each of us is participating in a culture that is exerting an influence on us, and on our children, and we need to be aware of what those motivational impulses and influences are, and what kinds of subtle effects they are having on us.  And we need to be tirelessly vigilant in that regard.

Thus, if Art is a mirror that is reflecting what is going on in the culture, then how can we not pay attention to what is going on in the world of the Fine Arts and in the so-called art, music, literature and film of the general culture.

And how can we not pay attention to our responsibility to provide a counterbalance with the intentional beauty and integrity of the things we do or make, the activities in which we engage, and the choices or decisions we make.  People of Faith especially have a responsibility to be authentic representations of the Creator.

To develop his point, Paquet uses the analogy of language, explaining that the ability to use language well should not be an end in itself:

“Language is a beautiful thing, but language should be in service of the thing being said.

And very often in the 20th century, Art has been where the artist creates their own vocabulary, and I have always found that curious, because you don’t have to create a new English language to say something special.  You just have to have command of the language and you have to have something to say.   The language of Art, the beauty of Art, is very exquisite, and requires time, and we live in a time when people are not terribly interested in an organic growth process.  

We have a pretty severe epidemic of self-esteem out there artistically speaking, and we’ve been told that we are fabulous just because we draw a breath on this planet, And as people we may be, but as artists it’s up to us to bring something of estimable worth to the world, and you do that by having exquisite command of the language [of art].  And you do that by digging deeper and having something to say that’s meaningful.  And it takes risk, and it takes courage, and it takes time.  And very often that’s a very individual choice for everyone.” 

Here Paquet is talking about the discipline and courage it takes for any of us to do anything that we do with integrity and beauty.  We need to examine our motivations and our intentions for our efforts and our choices, and determine that we will take the time and make the effort to be as authentic as is possible.

Paquet:

“External motivation ....... money, fame, awareness, the idea that you want to be noticed.  There’s a vast difference between having something to say and wanting to be heard.  And in the 20th century we’ve swung very largely towards wanting to be heard.  Everybody wants their 15 minutes of fame.  Reality TV is a perfect example, of that.”

Paquet quotes Rainer Maria Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet.  The young poet has sent some of his poems to Rilke for critique and writing advice.  Of course, the aspiring poet has not spent the requisite time in “paying his dues” so to speak and perhaps wants some easy answers, a quick fix.  Rilke kindly declines to critique his actual poems, but over the course of time writes the young man ten letters about how to learn to look at life so that he becomes a person who has something worthwhile to say.  These letters have become a classic for teaching writers, but have good advice on several topics for anyone.

Rilke tells the young man, 

“If your daily life [your environment] seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place.”  

Paquet explains:  “If your craft [your effort, your discipline] is insufficient, no matter how wonderful your vision may be, you are always going to be something less than what you could have been. “

He further explains why he doesn’t let the world spirit discourage him in his own artistic efforts, although his work runs counter to the "philosophy" of the current art world:  

“We live in a world now where people don’t pay too much attention for more than five or six seconds at a time, and to ask someone to look at a painting or to read a book seems to be getting harder and harder to do.  But I can’t think too much about that, all I can think about is what’s meaningful to me . . . and do what will leave something behind of the time that I was here.  

The beauty is what you bring to something, and the subject is secondary.

. . .

Art in the 20th century has been very psychological . . . there’s a lot of concepts out there . . . but ideas don’t keep you warm at night.   

Love and Grace and Beauty are things that have been horribly maligned in the last hundred years in the Arts, considered trite even, but the very sad fact is that the very people who are saying that do not live their lives without love, they don’t live their lives without Beauty . . . but irony and all those things have become paramount in the Arts. You know, the more edgy, the more salacious, the more harsh, the more shocking. . . .”  

However, when we witness something or someone authentic, it resonates with everyone, doesn't?  Authentic living is creating a life of purpose, and living that life with intentionality so that it is an actuality not a dream.  And this is the life God has called us to live.

“…prove yourselves doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves.”

—James 1:22, NAS 

That verse is a challenge to us all, isn't it?

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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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