Artist Statement

Brightscapes: The Way To Beauty

Artist Statement

What Is Beauty and Where Does It Come From?

By definition, beauty is “the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit.”  For me, this answer only raises more questions. What are those qualities and can they be quantified? Why is it pleasurable? What are those impacts on the logical mind and/or the emotional spirit?  Is it a part of nature or a human invention?  Understanding beauty seems to require a knowledge or a specific set of skills.  These skills have been called inspiration, imagination, and creativity. 

The Opposite of Beauty

To know beauty, we must understand the misery of ugliness.  What is the cost of boring suburbs, ugly strip malls, and a hideous highway?  Science tells us the price of unpleasantness. A dull office environment leads to absenteeism and higher turnover.  Traffic noise raises blood pressure and heartbeats; impacting related diseases. A lack of access to nature decreases a person’s attention span and an increase in local crime.  A school curriculum lacking arts decreases grades in all subjects along with a higher dropout rate.  Unattractive surroundings have a direct correlation to depression, obesity, depersonalization, alienation, detached feelings, sexual abuse, drug use, violence, and hate.  This is the opposite of beauty.

We are overstimulated by smartphones, excessive work hours, social media, and the inability to disconnect.  And having too much has made everything meaningless. We are “too busy” for beauty because we have prioritized “efficiency,” “profit,” and other lesser values.  While the internet is good for research and distribution, it can also make us shallow human beings. There is no search for difficult answers. No in-depth conversations.  It’s all about the results of instant gratification. And all answers are not equal. We need to remove extravagance, convenience, and speed so that we don’t view beauty as a frivolous subject.  Just another elitist hobby only understood by those with fancy educations. That we’re not entitled to beauty. That beauty somehow makes us ineffectual. These are lies.

Beauty Is Universal

It has embedded its concepts into our brains for more than 80,000 generations.  So strong that it is immediately identified by newborn infants. Biologically, it aides our relationships, sense of community, understanding of the world, ability to create meaning, and the displaying of our talents.  In short, it’s how we make decisions. Sexually, it signals who is a strong, healthy, young, and talented mate. Something large, colorful, and symmetrical is naturally assumed to be the best in our minds. This sexual ornament is used to pass on genes by signaling a wealth of available resources.  Socially, beauty communicates stories to train our minds for survival. Artistic imagination allows us to expand from our concrete experiences to include others, generate different outcomes, and various scenarios. It gives us real lessons for life. It allows us into other human’s minds to provides social empathy.  This gives us a template for controlling our emotions, shaping beliefs, and regulating behavior. Beauty is a guide to morality. It reveals truth, fairness, and kindness. To deny beauty is to deny morals. 

Humanity, Symbols, and Landscapes

What does it mean to be a human being?  What is human nature? Are our thoughts, feelings and actions unique?  If so, why? The humanities are a search of everything conceivable in the human mind.  This search is the cultural evolution of human history, but it also includes the science of our genetic evolution. 

Language is humanity.  It’s the act of converting words into symbols.  While language is instinctual, vocabulary is cultural.  Yet, emotions and moods are near universally understood without a common language.

Metaphors are creative descriptors used to express the imagination.  It’s the building blocks of language. And they are used in archetypal stories: heroes, tragedies, monsters, quests, bonding, and fantasy.  These archetypes culturally and genetically combine to teach the next generation how to survive. 

Landscapes have an outsized influence on those who inhabit it - not merely in economic ways, as wheat farming or housing developments, but in spiritual and psychic ways.  Landscapes are direct manifestations to the source of the universe. It is shaped by nature giving it high meaning. A “good” image can provide a “praiseworthy moral effect.”   It must be recorded and use poetic artistry. The look and feel of a landscape communicate not easily described feelings to those sensitive enough to listen.

Beauty Is a Survival Tool

It engages our brain with curiosity, wonder, emotions, play, experiments, relationships, and makes learning fun. Psychologically, it is a socially accepted way to express our unsatisfied desires.  Biologically, beauty stimulates our immune systems, increasing Glucocortoid Receptors in the Hippocampus to protect from depression. It helps us appreciate life and find happiness. Also, seeing a lush green meadow with a myriad of flowers and puffy white clouds as beautiful isn’t just a random, pointless, subjective judgment.  Our ancestors passed on those preferences to us genetically because it indicates this is a region of plentiful food and easy living. All of this adds to our longevity. 

No wonder patients staying in well-designed hospitals have shorter recovery times, use less painkillers, and are more satisfied with their care.  Patients with attractive landscape paintings in their rooms had lower blood pressure, slower heartbeats, and used less anesthetics than patients with no art or abstract pieces.  Art has the ability to promote rest, silence, and space for “just being yourself.” Adding beauty to life can help prevent and cure our sicknesses. True beauty heals, unites, empowers, provides happiness, and educates messages to those who are sensitive enough to receive them.  Perhaps because rivers in their courses offer romantic parallels to human life, people are inclined to attribute to them influences that strongly affect their lives. 

Creativity

Transitioning from fruit foraging to meat hunters, humans were forced to be more social and cooperative.  And eating that flesh combined with physiological evolution lead to extremely quick growth of the human frontal lobe of the brain.  This allowed humans to develop imagination. A “superpower” that allows the understanding of time, distance, and potential outcomes from actions.  Gathering around a campfire to cook meat developed our social skills. It was a place for storytelling, gossip, and bonding myths. A place to learn your role in society and the status of others. 

Creativity is using the imagination to produce a work.   An innovation of style, empathy, and metaphor.  Art provides a way of remembering, hope, grieving, understanding, growth, and appreciation.   It’s a contrasting drive for broad diversity and unique niches for survival.  A tool that enables us to be better people.

Beauty Is An Expression Of Ourselves 

Creativity is the act of making beauty.  It’s a personality trait of combining ideas to create something new through a process.  It’s using that productivity to make a change. It is a discipline that can take many forms.  Sometimes described as meditation, flow, openness, brainstorming, etc. It’s the ability to see that the current unsatisfactory situation is not permanent and the skill to develop and implement a possible solution.

Art is an understanding of nature.  Knowing that life is a progression of birth, growth, peak, decline, and death.  That there’s a cycle to the seasons and a balance to all things. Beauty teaches us that harmony is truth. 

Art is for influencing the mind; good and bad.  This influence can be an imitation of life, truer than life, communication, pure form, or other aesthetic.  In a free and open society, nothing is more important than a proper education with a free exchange of honest ideas.  And this learning requires an understanding of the arts. Competent training in images, forms, writing, mass media, and other creations immunizes us from deception, manipulation, and enslavement by those wishing to be tyrants.  Arts need to be a source of truth through the use of honest arguments; not a tool of purposeful lies for propaganda. Disinformation should be vigorously fought (https://www.stophateforprofit.org/). Providing clarity to the intellect is the highest honor for an artist. 

To create is to love.  It is an act of focusing your attention on something of interest and pleasure.  To make something everlasting. It’s the closest we come to immortality.

Knowing beauty is to see that originality is a myth.  Imagination is the combining of ideas, influences, and collaboration leading to new ideas.  And artists should acknowledge those motivations. Being the first to do something isn’t “original;” being different and better is. 

It’s an affirmation of life that can soothe us while in distress.  Art is a hidden reconciliation of opposites creating harmony from chaotic elements.  This is an energy that removes societal blocks and reimagines our cultural structures.  It breaks rigid, obsolete, and oppressive rules in exchange for higher values. It challenges and engages us toward more freedom.  To observe this, we need to respect and allow contemplation. Time with no destination, pressure, activity, distractions, or purpose.  Allowing yourself “boredom” clears away the poisonous mental clutter and grants the mind space for creativity. Strategic and purposeful procrastination to think of a goal or option is good.  This allows you to take in wider alternatives that are more creative and effective. Immediate productivity freezes creativity in exchange for quick and often less efficient results. The mind needs time to simmer on intimate thoughts for pattern recognition.  Our brains want to create meaning, sense, and order. So much so that our experiential memories will purposely change to “make sense” of situations. Art is not the solution to the world’s problems. It is a device of contemplation for a human mind that creates and solves its own problems. 

Creative people have role models and mentors that inspire them to higher achievement.  These people can even be fictional characters from books and movies. We need to find and be mentors.  We need collaborators to come together and experiment. To set aside time and space to work.  To be open, curious, and expect the same in return. Analyze the results while maintaining a positive environment. 

Creativity is helped by honest debate and constructive criticism.  Only listening to positive reviews from “yes men” and sycophants reinforces limiting and misguided views on the way to certain failure.  Dissenting opinions are useful even when they are wrong. It’s important to experiment and test our beliefs in the real world. To do so, we need to seek “problems;” not “solutions.”  People that come bearing “solutions” are not open-minded and only seek to implement their own opinion. But people presenting “problems” are willing to try various alternatives to find the best option for an issue.  And finding a true “Devil’s Advocate” will force you to be more effective and truthful. An truthful opponent can stress test our ideas to separate facts from fiction. We should welcome this criticism because these people care enough to state their honest views.  What we should fear most is a disinterested audience.

Beauty is Kind 

Those who appreciate Beauty are more elastic and adaptable.  Art enhances our empathy. Art is empathetic because it allows us into the mind of the creator.  A creator’s piece doesn’t pull the emotions from your mind; but delivers their feelings into your brain.  It explains the appropriateness and consequences of our decisions. Highlighting these impacts on others fuels empathy.  Our role in those positive and negative behaviors. That creates the sensation of guilt that forces us to right past wrongs and prevent future digressions.  The more types of beauty we appreciate (painting, sculpture, sports, theatre, etc.), the more accepting we are of others. Expanding our tolerance of what is beautiful reduces our fear and insecurity.

The most successful members of a stable society have a strong sense of empathy.  They can see what others see, feel what they feel, and gauge response with precision.  When to advance and when to retire. Whom to groom and whom to avoid. Whom to challenge and when to placate.  During social interactions, our brains go through a three-step process: 1) mentalizing goals and plans to achieve them, 2) empathizing feelings to predict their actions, and 3) mirroring and imitation.

How Do We Make Beautiful Art? 

Beautiful art reveals a truth.   It has a purpose for its existence.  It must reveal a “grey area” item like “love,” “justice,” or other virtue.  And art must have an understandable communication structure. A structure that is coherent and not unnecessarily complicated.  While the self can be referenced by the artist, it needs to be greater than just an individual’s personal ego. An honest forgetting of the self.  It’s not the paint that is beautiful; it’s the truth that it reveals to our mind that is. Still, art is more than just truth. And it’s not necessarily about morals, religion, or politics.  Art is a state of mind frozen in time. It’s about living a fuller existence. 

How Are We To Add Beauty To Our Lives? 

We need to accept it when it arrives.  To prioritize the value of beauty in all forms.  Beauty isn’t a waste of time, a luxury, or the domain of the educated upper classes.  Beauty is your own authentic personal experience. True beauty is independent, autonomous, and free of social pressure.  Imposed taste is manipulative and unethical as it takes away an individual’s identity. Art is not a communal experience.  Yet, sharing your love of beauty can build friendships. It is up to you to refine and develop your personal tastes and interests. We must be vulnerable and let down our guard.  To be courageous enough to think and feel our true conclusions. The sensation of openness, trust, symbiosis, caring, and being loved shows us that “everything is okay.” Beauty is a way of life.  It is the affirmation of life. To create is an act of love. It is the process of intelligence. It is a way of accessing and communicating with the human mind.  

References

Armstrong, John and Botton, Alain de. Art As Therapy. Phaidon Books, 2013.

Dutton, Denis. The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution. Bloomsbury Press, 2010.

Ferrucci, Piero. Beauty and the Soul. Penguin Random House, 2010.

Grant, Adam. Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World. Penguin Random House, 2016.

Howat, John K. The Hudson River and It's Painters. American Legacy Press, 1972.
Questlove. Creative Quest. Harper Collins, 2018.
Wilson, Edward O. The Origins of Creativity. Penguin, 2018.