I asked the earth, I asked the sea and the deeps, among the living animals, the things that creep. I asked the winds that blow, I asked the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars, and to all things that stand at the doors of my flesh…My question was the gaze I turned to them. Their answer was their beauty.
There’s a reason bank buildings are square. There’s a reason that when we need rest we go to a large body of water… or the desert. There’s a reason web designers use lots of white space. (Space allows readers’ eyes — and brains! — to stay calm so they can absorb the material.) There’s a…
The physicist Arthur Zajonc says that our culture needs the artist’s cognitive capacities. But what ARE those cognitive capacities? Perhaps those capacities include the artist’s willingness to be confused, welcoming any unlikely connection that shows up. Perhaps it’s his or her sensitivity to nuance and qualities of beauty that others miss. Perhaps artists are more…
One of my favorite art quotes is from Herbert Marcuse, a hard-to-read but brilliant philosopher. In The Aesthetic Dimension he writes, “Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the established reality principle…The encounter with the truth of art happens in…
“If we get lost in dark despair, beauty takes us back to center.”-Piero Ferrucci Anyone need that right now? 🙂
Many scholars have noted how Einstein sought beauty in his theoretical work. “As soon as an equation seemed to him to be ugly, [Einstein] really rather lost interest in it and could not understand why somebody else was willing to spend much time on it. He was quite convinced that beauty was a guiding principle…
The thing about art is that it brings us into the exact present moment of our life…and captures that moment. Attached is a little watercolor I did recently.