Paradise Café Discussions A Place For Bible Research And Christian Encouragement

An artist peers into the rubble of death and decay and glimpses what one less inured to such travesty cannot. He sees form, even intricate structure of great complexity, and ultimately, a singular, transcending beauty. This believer in what is not easily read by most senses that, in the swirl of visual chaos and stench of life's loss, renewed life will assuredly come to birth.

With or without the mere mortal's attendance upon life's reemergence from the grave, this process is an unending cycle: life, death, renewal. The destruction of the painter's canvas, the writer's essay, or the composer's manuscript is not an untenable blow to the creator's genius. Whether the ensuing conflagration is by literal fire or that of a public's outrage over a body of work ahead of its time, the perceptive artist knows that the phoenix will arise resplendent from the ashes. Her song shall be heard.

The hidden masterwork moldering away in a cemetery of a cellar long forgotten will be rediscovered, recopied and premiered before a humbled and contrite audience. The artist, now freed from earthly care and turmoil, observes among a once disbelieving public what he never ceased believing:

Beauty shines forth where the eyes of others have yet to fall. Beauty sings forth what their ears have yet to hear.

Hi Coco, did you write that? Good on you if you did.

Beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder.
The beholder of such beauty wants share it and is often astonished that others don't see it as he does. Which makes it even more brilliant, more precious, for the loveliness seems to reveal itself only to him.

- reminded me of : Say to those with anxious heart,
"Take courage, fear not
Behold, your God will come with vengeance;
The recompense of God will come,
But He will save you."
Then the eyes of the blind will be opened
And the ears of the deaf will be unstopped. Isaiah 35:4, 5

I like how the artist embodies pure, unadulterated hope without bias or self-righteousness. He just had an 'eternal desire' for what he saw in it all along to be experienced by everyone and enjoyed, which is beauty's sole purpose - enjoyment. I sense his 'perception' was that he was one of the first of many to whom the beauty would finally be revealed. He handles that knowledge without a hint of smug satisfaction. I like that too.

I liked it - thanks Coco!

Greetings, Willa!

I really enjoyed your insights into the life of the artist, Willa. Yes, I wrote this after today's inspiration drawn from the dialogue and music of Le Maitre de Musique, a 1988 Belgian film about a retired singer who takes two young singers under his wing.

The quotation below is from Pearl Buck, an inspiration to me since childhood via my mother. What Ms. Buck says about the energy behind the need to create is so true. Your comments about the artist's perception and simple understanding of what's what - no artifice or arrogance - are spot on.

Thanks so much,

CoCo


The instinct which creates the arts is not the same as that which produces art. The creative instinct is, in its final analysis and in its simplest terms, an enormous extra vitality, a super-energy, born inexplicably in an individual, a vitality great beyond all the needs of his own living — an energy which no single life can consume. This energy consumes itself then in creating more life, in the form of music, painting, writing, or whatever is its most natural medium of expression. Nor can the individual keep himself from this process, because only by its full function is he relieved of the burden of this extra and peculiar energy — an energy at once physical and mental, so that all his senses are more alert and more profound than another man's, and all his brain more sensitive and quickened to that which his senses reveal to him in such abundance thatactuality overflows into imagination. It is a process proceeding from within. It is the heightened activity of every cell of his being, which sweeps not only himself, but all human life about him, or in him, in his dreams, into the circle of its activity.