[Come enjoy my latest book Redesign Your Mind. It will serve you beautifully!]
Beauty is such a tricky word
1.
“We live only to discover beauty. All else is a form of waiting.”—Kahlil Gibran
What is this beauty Gibran is affirming?
2.
“If you seek happiness and beauty simultaneously, you will attain neither. For the price of beauty is self-denial.”—Gustave Flaubert
Respond to the prompt, “Beauty and happiness are different conversations.”
3.
“Once in a lifetime a really beautiful song comes along. Until it does, I’d like to do this one.”—Cliff Richard
Is only the “really beautiful” beautiful? Or can there be beauty one or two tiers down?
4.
“The pain passes but the beauty remains.”—Pierre Auguste Renoir
Respond to the prompt, “Beauty can and does return.”
5.
“The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish.”—Virginia Woolf
How do beauty and anguish connect?
6.
“The beautiful is as useful as the useful. Perhaps more so.”—Victor Hugo
Respond to the prompt, “Sometimes you need a can opener, sometimes you need beauty.”
7.
“The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express.”—Francis Bacon
If so, then what can a painting express? Only hints and intimations?
8.
“I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood.”—Charlie Chaplin
If trying to explain “beauty” isn’t the way, how can beauty be discussed? Or can it?
9.
“Beauty is unbearable. It drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.”—Albert Camus
If we can’t stretch out beauty to last over time, what should we do when the beauty isn’t there?
10.
“It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and pain, of strength and freedom, of disappointment and never-satisfied love.”—Benjamin Britten
Respond to the prompt, “If beauty can bring us pain, should we maybe try to avoid it?”
This quote struck a chord with me as I am currently struggling to produce my first art newsletter. I am introducing a series of covid inspired pastels and I realize that I am only able to do this because the worst of the pandemic seems to be almost over. I did this work near the start of this difficult time and promptly placed them in storage. I really could not look at this work in the thick of things. Only now can I see the beauty in these reminders of a time of fear and crisis. The work was a way to deal with my anxiety and a way to never forget the experience.
Lots of good thoughts or opinions here.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know in this world and all ye need to know.
John Keats