I name five beliefs that underpin my paintings: beauty, connection, kindness, nature, service. You can see the pictures on my art website www.fanadart.com
I want to write here a short piece about beauty.
It’s a word that evokes strong reactions. People fight to prove their vision of what’s beautiful is superior to other people’s. It’s futile. We see the world differently.
I’d like to keep things pretty simple. The origins of the word I most value are ‘attractive’, ‘pleasing to the senses’, and ‘suggesting goodness’.
‘Attractive’ describes something or someone that captures and holds our attention. We linger on the attractive. In a world that profits from our distractedness, objects that hold – for an extended period – our attention are challenging and important. Art encourages us to stop flitting from place to place, seeking the junk-food of instant gratification. Art, instead, invites us to linger in the moment.
‘Pleasing to the senses’ is an interesting phrase. It contains the need for contrast. Something is pleasing to the sense when contrasted with other things. Sweet things please our sense of taste. Too much sweetness nauseates. We balance pleasures against one another. Art contains elements of contrast and tension. Beauty comes from the relationship within a piece of work and between the piece of work and the viewer’s world. Without tension or contrast, it becomes bland: pretty rather than beautiful. Decorative and ultimately ignorable.
‘Suggesting goodness’. This is perhaps the hardest to capture. What is goodness? It’s highly subjective. So is beauty of course: it is famously ‘in the eye of the beholder’. I’m suspicious of any notion of a universal standard of beauty. Art, though, can remind us of types of ‘goodness’ we too easily forget, (a tree, a face, a pattern) and help us to see how goodness loos through someone else’s eye. I am profoundly suspicious of the oil industry, yet, seeing a picture of oil derricks in the Texas desert helps me understand what ‘goodness’ means to someone who sees the world differently to me.
Putting these three meanings together brings me towards how I think of art. It’s holds our focus, embodies contrast and complexity, and helps us see what is ‘good’ through the eyes of someone else (a fundamental of empathy and compassion).
I don’t always like other people’s art. Nor do I expect (or even want) everyone to like what I create. However I believe passionately in the role of art in encouraging focus, complexity and the ability to see other perspectives.
That, for me, is beautiful.