This is a continuation of an exchange begun several months ago with New Zealand photographer Tony Bridge. Tony has been waiting for a response from me all this time, while I've been snowed under by work and by family crises. So here is a letter, and I hope to be able to post his response soon. Please feel free to comment on this post in the interim.
Tony, I'd like to continue talking about beauty in art. In our last exchange you wrote:
Re-reading this passage made me reflect: are we, as artists who depict nature in words or images, trying to show and share the beauty we discover there, or do we find in nature an expression of an abstract ideal of beauty that already lives in our souls? What did your moths represent on that night? Didn't they stir something in you that was already present, just as a landscape may, or the flocks of snow geese I stopped and watched a few weeks ago, and this is what moves us to try to create, to try to express the emotions that arise? In other words, I think there is an interplay between the human being and the natural environment which is, itself, natural: we are meant to be part of each other, and to feel something - but we realize that a lot of people are much less in touch with this aspect of themselves.
Like you, I also made a choice: to try to write more about positive aspects of life and less about argument and politics and what is wrong. Some of that choice is based on self-preservation, some on personality and temperament, but some of it is simply an artistic decision: I want to try to share what moves me, and to express something about my own journey through life, a journey which is a search for meaning, connection, and truth. The longer I live, the more sure I am that the sages are right: that truth and light are within each of us - and that everything is connected. But it is also true that everything has its opposite: for the light, there is the opposite side of darkness; for truth, falsehood; for beauty, ugliness; for order, chaos.
In the assisted-living home where my father-in-law lives, the walls of the hallways are hung with beautiful pictures: bouquets of flowers, children playing, lovely landscapes, pastoral meadows, calm pictures of houses and seashores and gardens. I go by them often, and think about why people choose these sort of images: when I was a young painter I painted my fair share of them too. But now, at mid life, they all feel like cliches to me, except for the occasional image, often a watercolor, where instead of a frozen perfect moment, the sky indicates change and movement and a more complex emotional state than calm-happiness-that-once-was.
The truest art, for me, does this: it tries to hold the dark and the light together. There is a sense of edginess or uneasiness, as Pete and Dave and Miguel mentioned before, which may not mean literally showing the garbage on the side of the trail, but does indicate an awareness of the change that is ever-present in life. (I feel this in some of your landscapes but it's hard to describe or point to what does it.) The beautiful moment passes, a cloud obscures the sun, calmness and upheaval alternate in our lives, death follows birth. As humans we know this, while we may we try forever to deny it. While we may be drawn to beauty for its own sake, and need it very much, it is the poignancy of this deep knowledge of passage and change that stirs me as an artist and writer. Frankly, I find it much easier to express in words than in pictures, but you may disagree!
With best wishes from Montreal --
Beth
(related article from today's NY Times: "What (Ansel) Adams Saw Through His Lens")
Wonderful, thoughtful post, Beth. Your observations about the artwork on the walls of the home bring to mind one time when someone very close to me once suggested I should paint flowers. My reaction was one of shock and hurt though I tried to hide it. I thought she understood my art passion better. I explained that my work was more 'serious' than just making pretty pictures. But isn't that a problem many artists face, that so many viewers only desire pretty pictures? Your last paragraph says it so well for me, someone who has more difficulty with words than with images.
Posted by: marja-leena | April 27, 2008 at 12:23 PM
I almost worry a bit that the way I'm beginning to see beauty in so many and diverse things might start blinding me to whether things are good... so the unacceptable becomes acceptable, the unjustifiable justified; litter and decay and damage have started to become more visually interesting than typically pretty things. Also, that perhaps I'll turn away from and stop appreciating the 'normally' beautiful, and become blasee and unimpressed by flowers and sunsets and unspoiled landscapes. Then Iris Murdoch's quote - 'Anyone coming from a world without flowers would think we must be quite mad with joy to have such things about us'(may be misquoted).
Perhaps it's important just to keep a freshness of vision, and not lose the intensity of those things; blandness is the enemy, but then today's fresh and original will be tomorrow's trite and insipid, Monet, for example... Sometimes I almost wish I could go back to being satisfied with commonplace, pleasant things!
Posted by: Lucy | April 28, 2008 at 08:09 AM
...sorry, didn't finish a sentence there: should read 'Iris Murdoch's quote... comes to mind'. Dopey.
Posted by: Lucy | April 28, 2008 at 08:12 AM
Marja-Leena and Lucy, thanks for your thoughtful comments and the points you've raised. When I was first painting, I did paint flowers, and people loved them, just as the people in the retirement home gravitate toward their images of bouquets and sunsets and pretty impressionistic landscapes. Maybe as artists who've moved beyond conventional or literal ideas of beauty, we see these images as trite, but I find myself questioning my own judgments. Who am I to say that there is something wrong with the simplicity and directness of art that represents things universally judged to be beautiful, things in nature that ground us and make us feel better in spite of the drabness and difficulty of much of everyday life? As an artist I became tired with depicting those things realistically, but I still love and marvel at flowers, for example. Probably 90% of the people in the world, if asked to name something they find beautiful, would name the things we're supposedly rejecting as (literal) subjects! In photography the question is even stickier: photography looks at the world as it is, and the photographer isn't expected to "alter" or deny reality the way painters now are, though of course every photograph is framed and in some sense artificially selective. I don't know -- these are complicated issues!
Posted by: beth | April 28, 2008 at 08:34 AM
There are artists, such as Richard Tuttle, who are quite eloquent on the subject of how their art practice is a way to self-treat their own neuroses, i.e. overcome their fears. Is fear, whether directly addressed, or avoided by distraction, the central subject of art? If so, is that why art is hung in hospitals? Is it why art students try to hide from "the real world" by going to art school?
Posted by: Bill | April 29, 2008 at 10:23 AM
I suppose not. I get carried away. Many things are interesting to behold in the light of fear.
Posted by: Bill | April 29, 2008 at 10:29 AM