A Pause for Beauty:

An Artist’s Journal

Finding the Profound in the Simple

Six Hawk Head Sketches Watercolor

6 Hawk Head Sketches

During my travels I had an opportunity to talk to a couple of readers about the written content of Reflections. One conversation in particular with a fellow artist has been on my mind. I asked her A Pause For Beauty would be most interesting and useful to her. She turned the question around, and asked me what I would find most interesting if I was a reader. And then she asked what was most interesting to me as the writer.

"Well," I said, "Probably art, filmmaking, music, etc. that I find particularly thought-provoking, particularly unique. Minimalist art, art that is simple, elegant and profound." She said, "Do that. Paint that. Write that. And don't worry so much about confining it to one page. Do one paragraph when that's all you have to say, and four pages when what you've got to say needs four pages."

With this issue of A Pause For Beauty, I begin a series on the Search, my search, for simple, powerful profound art that inspires me. And hopefully you too. In the words of Keith Jarrett,

The more experience a person has, the more simplicity is profound.
- Keith Jarrett, pianist. Jarrett's album, The Melody At Night, With You offers an interesting and beautiful example of minimalism.

. . .

You can often tell roughly when a painting or movie was created. The fifties, the sixties, the seventies each have their look, for instance, as do the 1800s. Very little art can be described as timeless. An example of a work that is timeless, in my opinion, is the Chalk Horse, or Uffington White Horse, a 360-foot-long line drawing etched into a hill In the England countryside 3,000 years ago.

Picasso was strongly influenced by prehistoric art, by cave paintings and African masks. In addition to the quote mentioned earlier, which he said after visiting the Altamira caves (circa 1939), there is this quote of Picasso by his secretary, Jaime Sabartes (circa 1954),

"Primitive sculpture has never been surpassed. Have you noticed the precision of the lines engraved in the caverns?... You have seen reproductions... The Assyrian bas-reliefs still keep a similar purity of expression."

Above, I offer a chronicle of my struggles with a particular painting. The first six didn't capture what I was trying for. I tried to compensate by adding more paint. That almost never works.

I sculpt salmon over and over. Because that needs to happen, for me and the place here. To create that tilth. You create that thing over and over again. You are bored beyond tears. You finally get it. You told the story three hundred times, and you come to realize what the story was about. And I don't know what the story is half the time. But you keep doing it.
- Tom Jay, sculptor, heron Dance Interview

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You can find the rest of the 2022 Pause For Beauty posts here.