When all else fails, I usually find myself defaulting to painting beautiful things. This, I’ve come to notice, isn’t a phenomenon unique to myself.
Of all the themes prevalent in the arts, beauty seems to be the most transcendental. Throughout history, art has often been solely defined by its capacity to appeal to the common affinity for what is visually appealing. This affinity is ever-present within the arts, irrespective of time, culture or context.
Yet, despite its omnipresence, a material depiction of beauty is hardly constant. A sense of subjectivity pervades all attempts to unilaterally define artistic beauty within a single image.
Plato defines this subjective depiction of beauty as “imitation” — merely a simplistic, superficial understanding of what makes a form beautiful. In an example, Plato references an artist’s conception of a bed: As its maker, only the creator of the bed understands its true function. In contrast, the artist merely imitates a single image of the bed, wholly unaware of what the creator is depicting and entirely removed from their true intention. In turn, the audience is enamored by a false imitation of the subject’s real form.
Similar themes are later found in Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave.” Without reason and understanding, people at the bottom of a cave, like artists, are fixated not on objects but simply on the shadows cast by those objects onto the cave wall, unable to fathom that what they perceive is just a castoff of the shadows’ true form. Plato defines these castoffs as a simplified form of beauty and compares them to the true forms. These true forms represent “absolute beauty,” which is conversely omnipresent and impermeable. In the same tangent, he admits humans cannot grasp “absolute beauty” without enlightenment (and enlightenment is, for the most part, and for most people, constantly out of reach). He concludes that all humans can do is get closer and closer to this abstract form of “absolute beauty,” but they can never truly embody it.
In a sense, art in its most traditional form is an attempt to grasp “absolute beauty.” Either within their own image or through Hellenistic arithmetics, artists seem to depict solely that which is considered in some way to be beautiful. This is reminiscent of Socrates’s dialogue with prophetess Diotima, wherein beauty is coined as “the object of every love’s yearning.” As such, it’s evident that when an artist depicts beauty, it is an attempt to immortalize a subject that, while loved, is nonetheless inevitably temporary and forever out of reach.
All this, though, functions under the assumption that beauty is inseparable from love, or the reverse: that love is inseparable from beauty. In some ways, it seems true. That which we love is beautified by our own innate romanticism, and even more so when we seek to depict it. On the reverse, that which is beautiful commands our fixation — a fixation that translates onto paper quite seamlessly. But is such a simplistic connection really an axiom for the arts? To depict something, do we need to deem it loveable or visually appealing?
I guess it depends on what art functions as to each artist individually. For many modern artists, I’ve noticed it’s quite simple: art is a function of indulgence. That is to say, the modern artist produces their work with a sole voyeur in mind — themselves. Their own individual perception of what is conventional is the axiom of their work. And considering that humans are drawn to the conventional, it’s no surprise that beauty is most often the modern artist’s subject. As such, is there a moral significance to be derived, or a judgment to be made, from the act of appealing to a natural inclination?
Perhaps not. Maybe our inclination toward beauty is less reminiscent of beauty itself and more so of our culturally crafted innate aversion toward what we deem as ugly. Confronting what is proverbially ugly is equivalent to looking everything we abhor straight in the eyes, much of which is present deep within ourselves (this, retrospectively, explains to me why I so strongly recoiled at the thought of painting self-portraits for most of my life). Isn’t it so much easier to bask in the unattainable sublime, than to look inward?
All this, of course, also hinges upon the idea that art is a confrontation. While Plato might be right that art is simply an imitation, it’s an intimate imitation. To paint is to know your subject thoroughly. And while painting what is beautiful leads us to a deeper understanding of what we love, painting what is unconventional exposes to us that which we recoil away from, therefore leading us to a deeper understanding of who we are as individuals. Maybe only then, while staring for hours at a single form on a canvas, can we become intimately acquainted with our aversions. And there they can slowly begin to reveal their true meaning to us (and there certainly is a meaning — what isn’t a part of ourselves doesn’t tend to disturb us).
Of course, it’s easy to shy away from even the minor act of contemplation. I still find myself painting beautiful things. But rather than neglecting or moralizing our conception of beauty, by instead confronting what is ugly and understanding it thoroughly, maybe we can extend the object of our love’s yearning to include not only the conventional but even the most unbeautiful of subjects.
MiC Assistant Editor Aya Sharabi can be reached at asharabi@umich.edu.