Charles Hawthorne on Beauty

"The Trousseau" by Charles Hawthorne

"Anything under the sun is beautiful if you have the vision - it is the seeing of the thing that makes it so. The world is waiting for men with vision - it is not interested in mere pictures. What people subconsciously are interested in is the expression of beauty, something that helps them though the humdrum day, something that shocks them out of themselves and something that makes them believe in the beauty and the glory of human existence.

The painter will never achieve this by merely painting pictures. The only way that he can appeal to humanity is in the guise of the high priest. He must show people more - more than they already see, and he must show them with so much human sympathy and understanding that they will recognize it as if they themselves had seen the beauty and the glory.

We go to art school and classes to learn to paint pictures, to learn our job. Our job is to be an artist, which is to be a poet, a preacher if you will, to be of some use in the world by adding to the sum total of beauty in it. 

We must teach ourselves to see the beauty of the ugly, to see the beauty of the commonplace. It is so much greater to make much out of little than to make little out of much - better to make a big thing out of a little subject than to make a little thing out of a big one."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Hawthorne on Painting" by Charles Hawthorne.)