In fact, on my rounds through the gallery, I returned to it several times. By about the fourth viewing, I was awestruck. The painting, “An Interior in Venice”, shows a sumptuous room where a well-to-do, older couple are sitting in the foreground, the man reading a newspaper while his wife looks directly at us. In the shadowed background a young couple is standing. The feature of the painting is the light that shines on the older pair, particularly the woman, from an undisclosed source at right. The light has a clean but bold quality, soft yet dramatically enlivening – it’s a statement in favour of a couple in the twilight of their years, a reversal of the adoration of youth with the younger folk almost inconspicuous in the room.
The more I looked at the painting and its beguiling evocation of light, the more its sheer beauty struck me. I was almost in tears. The artist had achieved more than technical mastery – which in itself requires talent and years of work – his creation was inspired. The work had transcended its own forms, its technical and functional capabilities, to a level of refinement impossible to describe in words. Its power could only be felt, experienced, its appeal drawing from our highest senses.
Beauty has that spiritual quality, that refinement that takes leave of mundane experience with its separate forms and necessary functional requirements to a different level of consciousness characterised by unity and oneness. As the mundane is transcended it is also transformed, so that everyday life takes its place in that ultimate unity. Light entering a room is not simply light, but an expression of the nameless divine; a seated woman is not simply a woman, but a vessel for divine spirit. We need beauty to remind us who we truly are, in the fullest, most expansive sense. We need beauty’s charm of transcendence.
Nature is perhaps our most constant reminder of beauty. The sublimeness of a red sunrise, the hulking cragginess of ancient rocks on a hill, the power of the ocean pounding on a beach, the misty lushness of a rainforest, all draw us back into ourselves and towards the primal unity. Like the Singer Sargent painting, nature is inspired – which is why for countless millennia humans have worshipped it and sought to explain its wondrous qualities as the work of gods and other divine beings. Nature is the first teacher of beauty: in order to achieve something beautiful the artist has to align their consciousness to reach from that divine, creative ground of being.
As a society we don’t place much value in beauty; or rather it is overshadowed by other considerations. The ugliness of modern cities – with their dominant concrete buildings, roads and endless suburban sprawl – is a triumph of functionalism over beauty, of commerce and industry over simple joy of being. The material considerations of life are important, but they are not the sum of what it means to be human. “Man does not live on bread alone,” the truism tells us, and indeed there lies the root cause of much of what we do wrong as a society – a too narrow vision of life stuck in functionalist materialism. Beauty needs to return as a serious consideration in everything we do, so that human society reflects nature’s beauty more and that reflection finds fertile ground in the life of each individual and community.
Oddly, art itself nowadays finds beauty problematic – for many artists, it is related to conservative or bourgeois values. Hence, much of what is considered cutting-edge art is dark and discordant, aiming to shock or disturb, to deconstruct and disharmonise. In a way, this is symptomatic of where our culture stands more broadly – in a kind of no-man’s-land where the old certainties of religion and values no longer hold, where nothing ultimately is real or makes sense. The artist wanders forlornly through the “dark night of the soul”, the miserable landscape evoked in TS Eliot’s classic modernist poem, The Waste Land.
It’s important to understand that every culture in every period of history has had a particular relationship to beauty, has seen it in different ways and different forms. The spiritual dimension is always entered into from the field of time and space. I think it would be fruitful to investigate our own attitudes and find a way to re-engage with beauty; not in a superficial, Pollyanna or conservative fashion, but with the intention of healing and integration. We don’t have to stay in a dark place in relation to the deeper reality of being – light and dark dissolve in the boundless magnificence that beauty reveals.
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