An Exploration of Beauty

The Mystery of Beauty

Is this painting beautiful? Is beauty simply a subjective opinion based on cultural norms or is it something deeper? This post begins a series that will explore the importance of beauty in the human experience, mystery of what it is and why it opens the door to the deeper questions of life itself. The recent “Literati” inspired paintings and poetry has opened this door for me and I hope this path will lead to my next book.

Frank Wilczek in his tome, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design (New York Press, 2015), begins with these questions:

“Does the world embody beautiful ideas? …

What does it mean to “embody” and “idea”?

Embodying ideas is what artists do. Starting from visionary conceptions, artists produce physical objects ( or quasi-physical products like musical scores that unfold into sound). Our Beautiful Question, then, is close to this one:

Is the world a work of art?”

My answer is “yes.” I believe humanity, from the very beginning has interacted with the world, developed culture and left artifacts that answer this question with a resounding “YES!” In recent years, science has added to the chorus with exploration into subatomic particles to the reaches of the known universe with it’s trillions of galaxies shining from billions of light years away. There are “beautiful” equations, universal design concepts like fractals and spirals that govern conch shells and the Milky Way galaxy. This all leads to more questions, debated by scientists, philosophers, theologians and of course, artists:

So… if the world is “art”?

Is there an “artist” or is the world both “artist and art”?

Are there central “ideas” that are being embodied?

What about the “world” we can’t see, dark mater and dark energy?

I offer no answers, just thoughts through prose, poems and images that explore these questions. I think the image above is in fact, beautiful: an acrylic abstract I entitled: A Dream between Worlds that captures the spirit of these questions… what do you think?