Why Beauty Requires Courage
There is a particular kind of tiredness that I feel right now. Not the tiredness of having worked hard, but the tiredness of having witnessed too much. The news cycle, the suffering, the feeling that in so many ways we are teetering on the edge of . . . something.
It often makes the pursuit of beauty feel kind of frivolous. Almost embarrassing even.
I’ve felt it. I’ve stood in my studio arranging flowers and fabric and light stands and questioned whether I was doing something important or just coping.
I think it’s both.
Creating beauty is something I know how to do. I also think it’s one of the most important things.
Beauty isn’t the opposite of darkness. It doesn’t pretend the darkness isn’t there. When I look at the great painters of the past I see artists who lived in difficult times. Dark times.
The Restoration court of Charles II was a world rebuilt on top of revolution and execution. The Dutch Golden Age was funded by trade that came at enormous human cost. The women Vigée Le Brun painted were months away from a world that would try to destroy everything they knew. Literally trying to kill them and in the case of Marie Antoinette, did so.
But these artists, despite the turmoil around them, understood that beauty wasn’t their escape from history. It was their answer to it.
That’s what I keep coming back to, beauty as an answer. Not a solution, but an answer in a broader sense: a response, a declaration, a refusal to be entirely consumed by what is hard. To make something beautiful in a crumbling world means you have to believe that beauty matters even when no one is rewarding you for that belief.
The culture is not always kind to this sort of thinking. There is a modern mindset that treats beauty with distrust. Almost as if loveliness were a form of dishonesty, a hiding of the “realness” and complexities of life. I understand that mindset but I don’t agree with it.
I think beauty is one of the ways human beings have always told the truth. Not the truth of facts and events, but the truth of what it feels like to be alive, to love something, to want to preserve a moment against the inevitable progression of time. A portrait is an argument that this person mattered. That they were here. That the light fell on them in a particular way on a particular afternoon and someone thought it worth remembering.
That argument takes courage. Not the dramatic courage of crisis, but the quieter courage of continuing. Of going into the studio when the world outside feels heavy. Of caring about the fall of fabric and the quality of shadow when caring about such things feels almost indulgent. Of believing, without apology, that Dostoevsky was right —that beauty is not decoration, not comfort, not escape. That it is something the world genuinely needs and that making it is genuinely worthwhile.
There are days I struggle to remember that. Some days the cynicism gets in. Some days I wonder whether any of it matters.
And then I look at the way the light falls. And I remember that it does.
Michele
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