Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty 0 comments

By Peggy Rosenthal

Greg Wolfe’s editorial in the current issue of Image (#56) makes a convincing case for beauty, the stepchild in the classic trio of transcendentals: truth, beauty, and goodness. I’d like to throw into the conversation a lunchtime chat I had last summer at Image’s Glen Workshop — with sculptor Ginger Geyer, who was on the faculty that year.

Ginger’s porcelain sculptures are famed for their playful wit, which simultaneously tickles our fancy and pokes at our preconceptions. Like Greg, I’d been pondering how to promote beauty as art’s chief virtue, so I asked Ginger if the playfulness in her art might be called a kind of beauty. She paused and crinkled her brow. “‘Beauty’ is tough for me; it’s not how I see my work. And it was a negative when I was in school. But if you think of it as the beauty of truth — that’s fine.”

Ginger’s comment got me musing about the “beauty of truth” in contemporary art. Then I came upon multi-media artist Steve Scott’s essay on the very topic of “Truthfulness,” in a new collection of essays by Christian artists called It Was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God. Scott is candid about the exploratory and even bumbling nature of his creative process. “I am learning about ‘truth’ even as I am revising, editing, deleting, abandoning and restarting. For me, it is part of the journey I have been called into by the ultimately Truthful One.… I believe there is ‘truth’ in the process of searching for the right sound — even enhancing it with the right kind of echo!” For artists consciously working out of their Christian faith, Scott insists, “the limitations, idiosyncrasies and even flaws in our chosen medium — be it words, clay, paint, canvas, film, or sound — become essential ingredients in our vocabulary of ‘expressed truth.’… For me, there is plenty of ‘truth’ that comes through the dead ends and the false starts.”

Ginger Geyer has a similar sense of her creative process. Writing about her art in Image #33, she says with wonderful candor: “I have learned that perfectionism is not what carries the meaning in my art. The direct link between the spiritual and technical processes here is in the transformation by fire.… I feel defeated whenever I open the kiln to find severe flaws. Sometimes the piece is not redeemable, but often the flaws function as revelation.”

I find this notion of art’s truth to be heartening. In the creative process, the flaws and false starts can function as revelation, that is as unexpected openings to beauty. And I wonder if this might apply to our lives as well. In my own day-to-day fumblings, I’m aware of flaws and false starts more than anything else. Is art telling me that these are not final disasters but rather necessary steps in the creative process that is my life, anyone’s life?

This would accord with Greg Wolfe’s argument that brokenness is core to real beauty. I’d just add that brokenness might also be core to real truth.