Now we are really reflecting during our art workshop in Provence

To follow-up on my last post, during the last weeks I hired four astounding professors from various universities to work on the following question: “What is beautiful”? Their answers will be available shortly in the form of short presentations on Vimeo. This is our fourth and last post on the notion of beauty as seen by the sensitive Dominique Cosandey, a psychoanalyst from Montreal. To make a beautiful painting is to simply paint your own stories.  The beauty resides in the sincerity, in the authenticity, in the courage of the artist. The latter exposes herself or himself to tell, to share, to teach.  You do not know what to paint? Why not creating beauty from yourself. Dive into your interior to extract everything with colours and shapes.

Look at this old black and white photograph.  Now let’s just imagine how many true stories breathe in it, the extraordinary amount of possible paintings. In order for these paintings to be successful, you simply have to paint with truthfulness, even if the result is ugly (see former post on ugliness).  Works by the tandem Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin are a fine example of what Cosandey is trying to tell us. Some may think that their works are ugly… for me they are true and beautiful.

As for us at Walk the Arts, now at our painting workshop in Provence, do we have to reproduce exactly what we see in front of us? Or can we paint what we feel at this very moment in front of the Provence landscape? Can I include the “I”, the human being I am into the landscape?  To conclude our last four posts on beauty, is beauty simply the representation of truth? The true truth?