I Used to Believe in Beauty and Perfection. Then I Became an Art Teacher.
I believe art is transcendent. It has the power to transport us the way a beautiful flower or the perfect sunset does. One may argue that art is no longer about beauty, but it’s fair to say great masterworks capture beauty across time. Consider the perfection of the human body as seen in the statue of David. Yet my favorite part of David doesn’t lie in it’s perfection — it lies in the contrast between David and the pedestal at his base, where the marble is roughly hewn and we can see the chisel marks. That’s when the curtain is pulled back and we meet Michelangelo the wizard. David is an illusion made of marble. Beauty isn’t always in perfection. Sometimes beauty is seeing the artist’s hand.
It doesn’t matter if you love realism or modernism — that’s merely a matter of taste. It’s the difference between loving a cultivated rose or a wildflower. We love nature when we consider it beautiful but also how it reveals the hand of God.
Seeing the artist in the work can manifest any number of ways. In the painting Fruit and Insects, Rachel Ruysch carefully selects her composition. We see her hand in her choices and in the perfect brushwork that renders the fleshiness of the peach or the fuzziness of the moss. The same is true of The Starry Night. Short and long brush strokes reveal the quickness or slowness of that mark, the angle of the brush, the stiffness of the bristles. Within those brush strokes, I feel the power of the moment, and I am lifted to the time and space in which they were made.
Art is time travel.
Many years ago I had a student with a heart defect. His great love was doing art, and he dreamt of being an artist. He was a third grader, and his disease made him wise but left him small for his age. I often thought I saw the old man within the boy, but the old man wasn’t meant to be. He died the summer of his third grade year, and his death left me feeling useless. His art wouldn’t make it to the wider world, and my teaching of him came to naught. But when visiting his mother she held up a small pinch pot he had made. “I love this piece,” his mother told me, “because I can see where his fingers pressed into the clay.” I realized in that moment the power of art not just to bring us back to the artist but to bring the artist forward to us. It’s a give and take. Time travel engages ghosts.
As humans we endeavor to leave our trace on the world.
I love the finger marks left by Rodin, and I love the finger marks left by my young student in much the same way. Both are the marks they made on the world, and both are meaningful to the viewer that views them — sometimes as much or even more so than the beauty within the art. Rodin’s The Thinker thinks with his knitted brow, with his muscles, even with the grip of his toes, but it’s still Rodin’s interpretation. The intimacy of the details aids the trip back through time, where we feel the moment the way Rodin felt it then and wanted us to feel it weeks, years and centuries later.
Great art communicates across time and space.
But so does a child’s art. It’s the yearning for something, the telling of the story as the artist saw it. It’s taking the fluid, the viscose and freezing that moment in time. The medium used, the clay or the paint, becomes the magic carpet we float on that melts years away. That’s the beauty of art. A sunset dissipates. A flower fades. But art makes permanent the moment.
