3rd phase of my painting.
The harmonization of colors and lines = the embellishment or the beautification of the work.
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The content is firmly established with the second phase as well as the general composition. What remains to be done in this third phase is finding complete coherence in all the lines and colors and this more often than not is about eliminating all the non sensical elements. Beautifying is indeed the phase of making absolute sense.
The finishing touches, of this process of elimination, are about exclusively reserved to the harmonization of colors. The whole canvas sometimes receives a changed color harmonic but there is no law about colors that holds on its own. Last changes are executed simply out of the necessity to reaching color harmony over whole the canvas.
I already wrote a few times that I consider paintings as objects for interior decoration and I feel that an interior should only accommodate on a wall finished objects that are enlightening as well as decorative. I indeed have the weakness to think that what appears on your walls reflects on what is going on in your brains, in your life and in your family and thus I feel that the content of a work is sacred and it's form should absolutely be harmonious.
I don't mean to say that an art work should be beautiful in the sense that it should integrate the fads of the air of the times. Far from that. I consciently use the term beautification in a provocative way hoping to attract the attention of the reader. Fashion and fads have nothing to do with art, they are marketing realities and nothing more. In consequence the artist should remove himself from those artificialities and yearn for something more fundamentally sensical.
What I want to convey with the concept of beautification in art is this old idea of harmony. It's an undeniable fact that we are no more than a particle of dust in our universe and so the thinking goes that we should strive to harmonize within this whole. In other words an artwork should be reflecting our acceptance, of what we are, of our nothingness. Our vanity, greed and desires are indeed destroying in ourselves this idea of nothingness and pulling each of our actions into vain superficial and meaningless manifestations of marginality on the outer limits of the universal. That's where our "will" often makes us do, say, draw or paint unwholesomely.
I do not mean to say that our destiny is fully determined that we have no free will. What I refer to is this idea well known by the surfer that we first and foremost have to acknowledge the fact that we are no more than a grain of dust, in the sea, blown by the winds along the waves. Surfing is all about being one with the elements, one step out of their harmony and it's the fall. That's exactly what happens also in painting. One step out of the universal harmony of lines, forms and colors and the work lands on the outer limits of the universal. In terms of culture the work starts to be embarrassing, offensive or even repulsive. In music this story is more straightforward sounds that land on the outer limits of the universally accepted for the ear are stressful and can sometimes be extremely painful so we reject such sounds. The eye can accomodate about everything it's our minds that revulse and the memory of the experiences of the mind is what generates culture that's how culture in ourselves is reacting towards what is visually on the outer limits of the universal.
The beautification of a visual work is like surfing on the waves of the sea, accepting the wind as it is and playing with it. The recognition of our nothingness in the wholeness of the sea or for that matter of our universe teaches us non-resistance teaches us non action that's the moment in surfing when the wave carries the body that's the moment in painting when the mind follows the brush. Ugliness appears when there is resistance to the waves or action of will to beat the waves and also when the mind wants to beat the brush.
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