BOOKLET AVAILABLE:
WHAT IS BEAUTY? ART PHILOSOPHY FOR THE 21st CENTURY!

I have recently published a booklet I'd like to tell you about. It's titled, "What Is Beauty?" and the reason I wrote it is this: People seem to instinctively recognize that's it's a very fine thing for an artist to create something that has beauty. Before the modernist era everyone accepted it as a matter of course that the artist's job was to create something beautiful. If a person's work did not have beauty, then you couldn't really call that person an artist! That was what distinguished the artist from somebody else- the artist had the ability to create visual beauty! In the modernist era other concerns were put forth as the proper concern of the artist- flatness, accidentalness, innovation, paint texture, and so on- but these have proven to be relatively short-lived fads and fashions and today we see a strong movement back to realism and back to the idea that art
should be something that has beauty. Most artists have always striven to give their works beauty and most people have always considered that if it ain't beautiful it ain't art! Beauty is the sign of good work, of a job well done, and people consider it the highest compliment they can pay an
artist, to sincerely and emphatically say that his or her work is beautiful. Now in advocating beautiful art I want to make it clear that I do not mean to say that art should deal only in pleasant and pretty subjects like flowers, nice landscapes, pretty girls and so forth. Anything and
everything is legitimate subject matter for art and art depicting horrible things can have beauty if it is well done. The beauty of art comes from the quality of the performance, how well done the work is, not from the subject matter.
So when an artist does a good job, people look at it and say, "that's beautiful!" Well then, what is beauty? I've found that when you ask this question, you will get, 9,999 times out of 10,000, the standard same-old same-old politically correct lazy-minded answer: Beauty can't be defined!
Beauty is solely in the eye of the beholder! Everyone has a different idea of what they think is beautiful! This is nonsense. In the early '70s I began learning sign-painting and have made my living largely from this ever since. Early on in my sign-painting career, I noticed that if I did a job that I thought was particularly good, my boss or my customer, and pretty much everyone else, would also think so. If I did something wrong on a sign, in some way did a poor job that I thought spoiled the beauty of the sign, my boss or my customer would also see it, as would pretty much everyone else too. So I saw that beauty was the same for everyone, and that this idea that beauty is different for everyone is just nonsense. I was living in Toronto at the time, and dealt with all sorts of different
people from all over the world: Canadians, Americans, Jamaicans, Chinese and Japanese, Italians, Germans, Czechoslovakians, East Indians, Native Indians and so on and they all found pretty much the same things to be beautiful. So I could see that beauty was something objective, something that people recognized when it was there, not something just created in the minds of the people with each person creating a different conception of what is beautiful. And I began to notice certain principles that went into the creation of beauty. Beauty had to do with a balance of opposite
elements. I saw that a sign, or a picture, is composed of a series of pairs of elements of opposite qualities. These are: -Light and Darkness -Space and Mass -Warm Color and Cool Color -Bright Color and Dull Color -Rhythm and Chaos -Stability and Dynamism. Beauty, I observed, came from achieving a good balance of these opposite elements, with those appropriate to the purpose predominating. It is good for one or the other to predominate; a perfect balance is irritating rather
than beautiful. For instance, remember the old psychedelic art that jangled your mind? This effect came from a perfect balance of opposites. The artist would put equal areas of opposite colors, like bright warm red right next to an equal area of bright cold blue, and the effect was confusing and
irritating and mind-jangling because neither of the opposites sounded the dominant note. Therefore your attention would jump back and forth like a restless monkey from one to the other finding no place to fix on as the point of concentration. But a good balance of the opposites with the appropriate one for the purpose predominating looks beautiful. For instance, beginning watercolorists generally make their work look too light. Their work looks weak and insubstantial because light dominates darkness too much. Amateurish oil painting is generally too dark; it looks overly heavy and obscure because dark tones predominate too much. But the right balance of light and darkness is beautiful. Of course for different purposes you'll want one or the other to predominate. For instance, for a night scene you'd likely want darkness to predominate. For a picture of the beach at high noon on a bright summer day you'd probably want light to predominate.
And we could go down the list, showing how a good balance of the opposite elements makes beautiful art. And in my booklet I do just that. Learning these principles and keeping them in mind as you work can help you to more reliably create beautiful art. Well done realistic art is always beautiful. It's generally been supposed that the reason for this is that we are impressed by the artist's cleverness and skill in catching the appearance of 3-D reality. I think the reason goes deeper than this. 3-D reality always maintains a very precise balance. Everything we see,
illuminated by the sun or other light source, shows a wonderful and often very intricate and complex balance of light and darkness, highlights and shadows. When an artist does a good job of catching this light-dark balance the result is quite beautiful. The form of every object is determined by the
balance achieved within it, of gravity and levity. Gravity tries to pull it down, levity causes it to rise up, and the balance achieved between these forces determines the form of the object, and the balance achieved is again often quite intricate and complex and quite beautiful when the artist
catches the appearance of it. Real world colors always have an intricate and complex balance of bright and dull, warm and cool colors, and when the artist catches this well the result is quite beautiful. When the artist does a good job of catching the intricate balance among opposite elements that always exists in the real 3-D world, the result has a striking beauty.
Another thing I deal with in the booklet is the relationship between strength and beauty. A mistake I made early in my artistic career, and which I think a lot of artists make, especially those of the more modernistic sort, was to think that beauty equates to weakness and to make strong art
one must make something ugly, to shock people with something bizarre, harsh or grotesque. My life wasn't too happy when I was a teenager. I was usually very depressed and low energy. So in my early 20s I began to do a lot of things to strengthen myself and give myself more energy, trying to achieve some get-up-and-go and joy of life that I had rarely known in my younger days. I tried several different kinds of Yoga, a strict natural raw food diet, jogging for miles and other sorts of exercise, and some therapies for release of repressed emotions. And all these things did give me much more energy, and improved my health, and made me able to enjoy life far more than I had before. And I found that, the stronger I felt, the more I wanted to, and was able to, create beautiful art. Raw food diet in particular was helpful in this regard. When I lived on 90% or better of raw food, I found I had about 4 times as much energy as when I ate mostly cooked food, and I was able to draw more clearly and with better proportions, my compositions were bolder and livelier, my sense of visual rhythm was strikingly enhanced and my colors became much brighter and more beautiful. So I learned that strength and beauty in art go together. When art lacks in strength it also lacks in beauty and vice versa. We see this in nature too. When a horse is strong and healthy it will also be very beautiful. A healthy flower on a vigorously growing plant will be very beautiful. When people are in their prime, youthful, healthy and in good shape, they are also at their most beautiful. In nature, ugliness is always a mark of weakness and disease. Now the "artist's lifestyle" has traditionally involved a lot of unhealthy habits, like frequent drinking, cigaret smoking, drug-taking, a lot of junk
food like pasteurized cheese and white-flour crackers at those openings-- and the poverty-stricken "starving artist" might be living on boiled beans and white bread and margarine and coffee---all of them things that don't support your health all that well, though I must confess I still enjoy coffee quite a bit. If you're a poverty-stricken starving artist I'd like to suggest you'd do a lot better to live on raw cabbage and soaked and sprouted raw lentils, and wild greens like dandelion and lamb's quarters, and whatever other wild foods you can find growing in your area- I like the blackberries and persimmons and everlasting pea greens that grow around here a lot- this sort of stuff is cheap and extremely healthy! Art cannot be any better than the artist, the creation cannot be greater than the creator. So if you want to do your finest art then I think you'll find it very useful to take good care for your health so you can be all you can be! Another advantage of doing this is that you'll much more likely be able to keep doing your best into middle and old age. It takes a long time to become a good artist. After 10 years my style started to look professional, after 20 years I finally felt I was beginning to develop some real ability; you don't want to have your health breaking down and become unable to work just when you've gotten in enough practice to start to get good at it.

So that's a brief summary of what's in my booklet, "What Is Beauty?- Art Philosophy For The 21st Century." If you'd like to read the whole thing, send me a five dollar bill and I'll send you a copy.

Joe Alexander
257 22nd St.
Fayetteville, Arkansas 72701 U.S.A.