About Beautiful

I am at the beginning of a new series of paintings and am deliberating about how to do them. I plan to make panels of color that will be hung together in groups of three, four or five. There will be a red panel and a blue panel and an orange panel, the whole rainbow. As many and as different as I have the time and energy to paint. The challenge is to keep them as simple as I envision them and lusciously beautiful at the same time. Their reason to be must be only their ravishing presence.

Beauty comes in an infinite variety of forms and has much to do with time and place and person. I remember as a youngster seeing some of the lingerie of my mother’s trousseau and thinking it unattractive. I found it very lovely some years later. Beauty can be delicate or brash, moving and tender, or heartbreakingly sad. It can be serene and bring peace. Music can evoke all that and more. I want to do it with color. Mark Rothko did it in his way; Pierre Bonnard in his. I have been looking at the work of artists (too many to name here) who have used color in some magnificent way, everyone different and lovely. Now I will do mine.

I have been warming to the project by making the small color panels seen in the photo above. I must have made a hundred in the last week. They take lots of layers, several different materials in addition to the acrylic paint and require a kind of “back and forth” process. They are for practice and I am using them as interim work and will go back to them when I get too serious about the larger pieces.


These are the beginnings:

I will upload photos now and then as they progress, maybe even including the times that they look awful and I am stumbling in my path. There are thirty-one of these panels in four different fairly large sizes.

As I said in a recent note to a friend, I never quite reach my objective in terms of drop-dead gorgeous color, but it doesn’t matter. This is more about the quest itself than it is about reaching goals. What matters is doing it. In the long run it doesn’t matter how successful the work is by anybody’s lights. There is, however, a reward in the paintings themselves. When finally hung together in carefully orchestrated groups, they will have some of the joy that I felt while making them. And that will be enough. Until the next round.

John Kenneth Galbraith: There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.