Beauty and Belief

 

A friend recently asked me how my beliefs influence my art. Articulating subtle impulses and emotions is a difficult thing to do.  However, in an effort to bring a bit more clarity to what I personally consider an important topic, I will attempt to express some of my thoughts on the subject.

            The question isn’t new.  Great artists of the past such as Corot and Inness had a deep connection to nature and saw their art as a spiritual pursuit. George Inness said: "The true end of Art is not to imitate a fixed material condition, but to represent a living motion,” and added "the intelligence to be conveyed by it is not of an outer fact, but of an inner life."  In the painters mind these Swedenborgian beliefs of “inner life” and “living motion” are given a higher priority than ocular observations and other temporal aspects of nature. These beliefs had a profound influence in both Inness’s choice of subject and manner of painting. Although our beliefs don’t completely match up, I do believe that there is a spirit in all living things and it is this spirit that animates and gives life, meaning and significance to the forms, textures, colors in the natural world. However I don’t stop there, the inner light and significance of these form is coupled by the equally significant what I call the “outer light” given by our sun. The additional focus on outer light adds for me an extra layer of meaning and study in my work and inspires me to see beauty in even the most mundane things. In this sense I’m not trying to see beyond the temporal world toward a more transcendent beauty but instead seeing the spiritual and temporal as a marriage where both play an equal and important role in my work.

Corot expressed similar feelings when he stated: “Beauty in art is truth bathed in an impression received from nature. I am struck upon seeing a certain place. While I strive for conscientious imitation, I yet never for an instant lose the emotion that has taken hold of me.”  The balance between the “conscientious imitation” and “emotion” is where I feel significance and beauty lie. 

Some wonder why, at the beginning of the 20^th century, serious art was no longer made to be beautiful and in many ways beauty in art was to be eventually despised and rendered insignificant. Perhaps it was due simply to a loss of belief.

I understand in a post-modern world where secularism is king, my belief in God, spirit, and beauty could be seen as heresy or at best naïve. However, if we wish to advance as a society and turn the tide of pollution and ugliness that exist today, perhaps we need belief and beauty as never before.