“Each age has its own aesthetic needs…” I nodded to the words when they filtered through the handheld recorder on the museum audio tour. While I have no idea what our current age needs, I nodded, because my own aesthetic need for beauty runs through my veins like an electric pulse.
Michael and I planned for a short weekend visit to New York City to escape our current situation at home (a puppy with terrorist tendencies, a basement renovation, a home packed floor to ceiling with the displaced stuff from our basement). We didn’t realize what a relief it would be to leave behind the daily-ness of our life.
Our home life is, in and of itself, beautiful, however imperfect. But, sometimes the cure for the common life is beauty, and I find beauty in art and theater and French food and high heels and urban parks ringed by skyscrapers and turning trees.
One of the reasons I need beauty in my life is because it satisfies a curiosity, it scratches the itch that is my imagination. The more I experience it, the more I fill the need inside me. This fuels my own amateur art-making, and more importantly, makes for a richer, more fulsome life.
On an evening visit to the Museum of Modern Art, Michael and I entered a room full of Matisse paintings and my eyes immediately gravitated towards one piece called The Red Studio. I’m not well versed in modern art, nor do I think this age is particularly primed to appreciate his aesthetic. However, this painting reached out from the wall, grabbed me by the scarf, and begged me to linger there. The beauty of it struck me with such a force, it brought me to tears. I blinked hard as the rest of the museum patrons shuffled and murmured behind me.
The Red Studio represents a dream, my dream: A room of one’s own, surrounded by the most luscious, edible color, walls lined with one’s art, a dog cozied in a corner, a vase of trailing vine, a work in progress, an empty wine glass. On the far wall, a grandfather clock without hands left me standing in the Red Studio suspended in time, suspended in his bright, beautiful dream.
Each age might have its own aesthetic need, but so does each individual. You get to decide what is beautiful, what cures your common, what lights the match of your imagination. You are Alice and beauty is the rabbit hole through which your world comes alive with all the vibrant wildness of the unexpected. It is the painting that takes you by surprise. The berries left behind on bare branches. The french waiter who calls you madame as you smile and sip a cocktail and wear your blush lace blouse like it’s a habit. It’s the Matisse, the Charles White retrospective , the organ pipes gold and polished against a stone staircase–music tilted towards heaven. Beauty is always tilted heavenward.
