What is beautiful?
velvet gloves, orchids, and child's play
I love that everyone has their own idea of what is beautiful. What we consider beautiful can return us to our true selves, who we were before we noticed the ugly, the disappointing, the heavy.
“For me, beauty is a physical sensation, something we feel with our whole body. It is not the result of judgement. We do not arrive at it by way of rules. We either feel beauty or we don’t.”
We grasp at fallen feathers, walk into buildings that could be palaces, look up at trees and billboards, read a line in a book, see a film, take a photo, touch fabric, run hands down the smooth wood of a banister, hear bird song, hum along to lyrics. Soft leather gloves and the perfect red lipstick, or a bike, perfect proportions.
“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”
J. D. Salinger, “A Girl I Knew”
It gets under our skin, all this beauty. We take it in, inhale, sometimes we might make something. An offering of little consequence.
But how can we? we ask in a hushed whisper. When all around us is ugly, bad, and sad. But is it? What else can we do after we pay witness and see the pain? Isn’t balance about holding it all in one palm?
When I lived in Strasbourg I was so struck by the beauty everywhere, I felt like I was tuned to a different frequency. The cobbled streets seemed to hum, and the ancient walls wept. When I walked into the medieval church, cool walls welcomed me. Dusty corners, peeling art, and the scent of frankincense.
One Christmas I walked into a tiny church in France at the top of a steep hill. Like a jewel, it balanced on rocks. Tears sprung to my eyes as I crossed the smooth stone.
Another church in Rome: the sound of someone practicing the organ in that cavernous space has lived in my body ever since.
The first time I saw the Milky Way and felt smaller than a dot.
A few times: in a forest, so dark, you hear more than you see. A wet, mulchy smell curls and winds around me, the breeze rattles leaves, and my cheeks are startled by the cold.
When my parents lived in New York, MOMA felt like home, I loved the art so much that I left a Law degree to pursue History of Art. I defected from the holy grail of law to a finer place, struck in a museum by something that has no words. I swapped the law library for classes in the National Gallery.
A summer market in Spain, blazing with colour and scent, slow walking people who stop to peruse, beside the fast-talking chefs who know what they want. Olives, their thick skins tumbling, onions a tower, soft embroidered linen monogramed for someone long since gone. The stalls like tiny dabs of watercolour, blend.
Beautiful things pulled me like a magnet.
But I was no artist, sadly. I tried hard but I was always more a consumer than a maker. My talent was the problem, not my will. My wooden stool, made in school was always wonky, my pottery never came out right, I couldn’t draw but loved to doodle and play, and I studied dance but felt heavy rather than light. Photography I could do. And I always wrote.
At 10, taking photos of cherry blossoms, the ground all pink snow, and my small hands trying to make sense of a camera. At 14 making my friends do fashion shoots so I could be their photographer. Much later, I became professional and did weddings, portraits, and maternity. I was always striving to be better but kept hitting a wall.
Once I did a photo project of tailors in Brunei. I loaded a camera with black and white film and walked into tailor shops and asked if I could take their photos. It was a curiosity project, an honouring of their trade, the smiles live on, filed into plastic sleeves.
It is children who do it best. Little children, faces wide with glee, press wet hands onto paper and watch art appear. Everything is possible, it is all beautifully created and taken for granted. Children make art like they are creating the world.
At some point, things get serious and we stop making things. We might collect beauty, trap it with our phones, or buy something for our walls. Make our food pretty, and select the perfect napkins. We are wired toward symmetry, our eyes are made to drink in beauty.
Many years ago, before copy and paste, I used to love making collages. I scissor-cut pictures out of a magazine and used an X-acto knife to make the edges perfect, then carefully glued them into considered patterns. I looked for the theme. I hung them around our tiny studio. I still have the knife, it’s on my desk now. Never used.
Children do it just for the tactile joy. Making things with no thought of quality or what to do with the thing you made. I make things to place myself closer to art. To try and touch that thing that I can’t explain. To float on the periphery.
Inspired by
, and feeling antsy one rainy Sunday, I remembered collage. The little joys of choosing, the careful placing, the act of discernment. Just for the joy of finding and making something.#1: Food in Art.
Three different pieces of art.
Two old films.
The Lobster by Yorgos Lanthimos is a highly unconventional love story. It is odd, bizarre, a firecracker of imagination, dark and funny.
Alice in the Cities by Wim Wenders is such a film of beauty and poetry, I felt it in my bones the next day. Beautifully shot in film so rich you can feel the texture, characters who inhabit their skin so perfectly, pathos in eyes, love in hearts. It is a child’s memory.
One photo.
I love getting film back, it is a thrill unlike any other. I tried a new film for the first time: HARMAN Phoenix 200. It’s quirky and has character. Here is one I like.
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Eyes open, beauty is everywhere
loved this! next time you're in town.let's. have a collage playdate:))