Beauty and the Creative Impulse

Beauty and the Creative Impulse

This essay, out of the three, was my favorite. The author had a lot of good points to support her thesis in which she stated that beauty is something integral of the world we live in; the earth that the Creator created. She also brought up the fact that sometimes we move so fast that we take beauty for granted. In this day and age, we live our lives in fast forward and we, almost literally, do not even attempt to stop or even slow down to smell the roses. She uses the ideas that beauty is an improvisation, that it sometimes takes on the role of form and sometimes it also has a function, as in the story of the quilt. She also pointed out that beauty is “not merely a matter of face and figure, or personality, but a totality of human graces which may enflesh aspects of the divine shining through individuals as through a series of windows.” In other words, beauty should not be taken for granted, and should be appreciated. Her points were very well thought out and all supported her thesis, and very well at that. The author is declaring her definition of beauty is the one and seemingly only definition of the word. There is no real flexibility in the definition of the word beautiful that she gives to the reader, although her definition is fairly broad in what it all entails. What is beautiful, I think, is different for everyone. It something that when you see it, you just know deep down within you, that it is beautiful and no one, not matter how hard they try, can convince you otherwise. What she said about how we, as human beings, were made in God’s image and so we, as God is a creator and created us, are also to create. What we create does not necessarily have to be the next Mona Lisa. Like the author states about the magnetic words on her fridge, simple, thrown-together, magnetic words made into a poem on a fridge can be beautiful. The running theme that I saw throughout this essay was that it all goes back to God. Somehow, some way, it all returns to Him. What the author had to say in this essay really got me thinking about my own art and creativity. I guess I never thought about how a picture that I take of a baseball player hitting a ball against a rival team or writing a story for the local newspaper about how the city council is balancing the budget in the new year, it is something beautiful. It is something for all those who come in contact with it to enjoy and soak up the beauty of it. In conclusion, the author maintains that “art speaks so powerfully to our inner beings and emotions,” and I believe that that in and of itself is what makes everything creative, artistic and therefore, imaginative, beautiful.