Last week, my house was painted. Four men from the vendor company came and finished the work. It took them almost a weeks time to finish the entire house . During this period, my wife had many tizzy & surprising moments when she saw stock of my piled up books! Also, we both were dumbfounded after realizing how unwittingly we added lot of clutter in these five years after our return from the States to India! Later, it took us a long time to declutter the entire house and to rearrange the house into a sumptuous modern shape.
While doing this work, I saw this master painting made up with natural colours on a palm leaf which was hanging idly in my hall. For a moment, I have taken it into my hands and observed once again closely the beauty of it and the man made intrinsic art work behind! Today, while sitting in my seat watching this art work again and again, in ensemble, it prompted my thoughts to think about “Beauty and its relation to art.” That is shaped like this:
Beauty & Art
Beauty may simply be defined as that which gives pleasure and beauty has also been brought to a point of absurdity, reckoning, eating and smelling, as art. Whereas, some defined art simply as “intuition.”
Beauty is evanescent or transient. In the appreciation of beauty we proceed from the physical object though its penultimate reach abstraction. From an initial cognitive plane to a spiritual conception, the peregrination takes us through different stages in consequential importance. The knowledge of the form of beauty is imperative. This knowledge is acquired, as Pluto laid down, by a, systematic study of the exact
science of measuring weighing and counting called the theories of Numbers, Geometry, Stereometry and
Astronomy. In of prolonged study of these branches the seeker will be rewarded suddenly with the apprehension of beauty—a kind of mystical flash. Thus beauty whose foundation is firstly established in
a sensuous plane is stabilized into a plane of spiritual realisation.
Whereas, the creation of a work of art is preceded by an intense preparation. It means that an artist must have knowledge of that branch of art in which one employs himself, such as, music, painting, literature or an art of allied kind. The sudden chrysalis of creative art with which we are presented with is but the conclusion of an intense activity which precedes it. Thereafter, the artist passes through a period of ‘incubation.’ He jostles and nurtures with his idea in a plane under the surface of mental immediacy when the appearance of a happy idea looms up in a flash of ‘illumination’ and finally comes before us in the shape of finished art be it music or painting. These series of processes play unseen to us.
Tolstoy (1828-1910) defined the process of art as:
“To evoke in oneself a feeling one has experienced and having evoked it in oneself, then by means of movement, colours or sounds or forms expressed in words so to transmit that feeling that others experience the same feeling—this is the activity of art “
Beauty is emotional satisfaction. In beauty we realise an emotional equilibrium where the impulses are harmonised. The fact that certain forms, colours, tunes move us and others do not provoke any emotional participation, leads us to questions which await answers. Dissonance caused by misarranged notes in music or colours in painting jades the aesthetic sensibilities and dissipates harmony of the content.
Beauty or aesthetic sense is, immured in even primitive people. These are amply exemplified in the cave drawings of animals at Altamira in Spain as well as in those of the Bushman paintings in South-west Africa. However, the plastic sensibility found in this period disappears in the Neolithic period. Many foregone illustrations deny the common acceptance of corelating beauty with art. Art fulfils itself in harmonious expression which may not be beautiful. In paintings, particularly of the surrealists or savage
primitives, they attempt to express in grotesque forms which are far from being beautiful. They are a far cry from a Greek Aphrodite or a Byzantine Madonna. From the standpoint of classical concept of beauty they are definitely ugly and unbeautiful but nevertheless they can claim to be called works of art.
So, ‘beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder! Isn’t?’
sivaayyala 