Can Beauty help us? Perhaps a manifesto

Can Beauty help us? I make art to learn what I am thinking and feeling.  While it is always an internal investigation, I am engaged with the world and culture around me.

I am a quiet contemplative, a delayed emotional reactor, a visual glutton.  I think and mediate, I get mad the next day and I just simply have to look…all the time. From this essential disposition and with study and thought I have adopted a theory for my artmaking that I call “radical beauty.” So, here goes!  Starting with a few appropriate quotes.

MANIFESTO ON THE POLITICAL NATURE OF BEAUTY

 

Can Beauty help us?

  • Late critic David Hickey– Beauty is “The pleasure we take in something that transcends the appropriate.”
  • Irish poet and Priest John O’Donahue– “Even amidst chaos and disorder, something in the human mind continues to seek beauty. “
  • Rumi- “Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”
  • Frederick Turner– “Beauty …is the highest integrative level of understanding and the most comprehensive capacity for effective action.  It enables us to go with, rather than against, the deepest tendency or theme of the universe.”
  • St. Augustine– “I asked the earth, I asked the sea and the deeps, among the living animals, the things that creep.  I asked the winds that blow, I asked the heavens, the sun the moon, the stars and to all things that stand at the doors of my flesh…My question was the gaze I turned to the.  Their answer was their beauty.”

“Radical beauty” is not about pretty décor nor reproducing lush landscapes or beautiful faces any more than civility is about being nice.  It is deeper and more political than that.  “Radical beauty” is about creating glimpses of the world we want to see by providing “moments” of awe, meditation, surprise that might invite the viewer into action for healing of the planet, relationships, cultures, environments.

I contend that we all know that the world is fucked up. No need to see reproductions of devastation by even the most talented of artists to be reminded of these facts. I don’t want too many reminders. The facts are all around us. The weather is wild, wars rage, politics are more divisive than ever. Anger, threats, and suspicion reign and the capacity for hate rises.

I am aware of this. You are aware of this.

I contend that we need to be reminded of what we seek: peace, health, abundance.

How?

We cannot ignore the destructive actions all around. But I contend that if we artists provide opportunities for beautiful encounters, awe struck encounters, on these very topics, that we can be reminded of what might be.  We might fall in love with our world and each other all over again. It’s a stretch.  It is slow, grassroots and essentially political.

Can Beauty help us pay more attention to climate change? Beauty calls me to love this planet more carefully.

These new works, combining mixed media with digital embroidery,  are taking on climate change: Water Course: concerning water rights; Atmospheric Rivers which caused catastrophic flooding in the Northwest and Neotectonic Ancient Period 2 concerning seismic changes, increasing earthquakes.

[su_image_carousel source=”media: 10278,10275,10261″ limit=”40″ slides_style=”photo” crop=”none” columns=”4″ captions=”yes” link=”image” target=”self” autoplay=”7″ image_size=”medium”]