"The human experience of the world as beautiful would not be possible without the condition of mortality, ours and its. Or we might say in the most general terms that beauty is made possible by temporality, as loss is made inevitable by it. Loss, we might say, is an experience of the asymmetry of time, its Coyote suddenness and torpor, its imbalances and gaps, both the world's evil and the source of its goodness, its need...
To lose and merge into the world simultaneously is both our desire and fear, both omnipotence and death, truth and emptiness." (p. 150-151)
This book has been even more insightful the second time around. Beauty can be a difficult thing to discuss in contemporary art; certainly "pretty" is used most often as a derogatory adjective for painting. I am not interested in making merely beautiful paintings, although sometimes that seems to happen in spite of my art school training. Yet, it would be pointless to deny my appreciation for the beautiful and the well-crafted. There has to be a place in the art world for well-made, aesthetically pleasing paintings that are not exercises, that have at least as much content (or possibly more) than zombie formalism and the like.
Maybe it isn't the painter's job to ask these questions; perhaps it's enough just to make the thing, and best to leave the theory to the critics. Still, as I recently finished one body of work and am in the midst of starting something new, this is what I find stumbling around the recesses of my dusty brain.
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