![]() ![]() The good kind of wandering, where I don’t know where I’m going, but I know roughly how to get back. What is beautiful may become grotesque, and grotesque beautiful, depending on the frame, the story to which it belongs. A master’s eye and skill can properly frame the beauty for you. Picasso’s bizarre surrealist art is said to be all the more impressive because it came from a master neoclassicist painter: The master of the form creates communal beauty, and this allows peculiar beauty to be understood as all the more breathtakingly genius. Deviations from certain types of aesthetic norms have often been called the grotesque, and yet even with these there is a beauty seen with the right eyes-the right eyes directed to its beauty by a masterful hand. We perceive a leaf on the ground and marvel at both its likeness to others and its difference from others-each is beautiful in a common, communal way and a peculiar way. In perceiving the beauty of an object, we are perceiving its likeness and difference. “Beauty … is a relation, and the apprehension of it a comparison,” wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins. When I look at his paintings, it feels like Grandpa gave his love and memories to me. ![]() That which was not supposed to be considered beautiful somehow became beauty in the skilled hands of Grandpa Jim. There was always an inexpressible beauty in his paintings-no doubt increased by my love for the artist-but there was also something of a disturbing beauty in them. I was young, very young, when I first saw my grandfather’s painting of this mysterious man who was either-according to my young imagination-an artist on the streets of Paris or a fisherman freshly docked.Īmidst the palettes of scraped rainbows and snapshots of Americana speckled across the walls- depictions of dilapidated barns with “Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco” signs nailed to the sides, vintage semi-trucks driving by roadside general stores, snow-covered split rail fences, and the aura of “honest work”-I could not help staring again and again at the painting of the man, which I consider to be the pinnacle of my grandfather’s work. His face was as rough as his beard, the sky as rough as his face. Memories of family, friends, some gone and some missed. I sensed a life of sweet memories emanating from his experienced face. Inside his weathered mouth was utter darkness, like a volcano ready to erupt in an old tale and recycled laughter. He had a white beard, and eyes squeezed shut in laughter. Only a slight rim of a pale green sky adorned his head like a halo. There was a man whose face filled the whole sky. ![]()
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