Art of the Positive

Persepectives from The Artist's Road

Peonies 1895 Isaac Levitan

“If the world was a kinder place, perhaps we would be less impressed by, and in need of, pretty works of art. One of the strangest features of experiencing art is its power, occasionally, to move us to tears; not when presented with a harrowing or terrifying image, but with a work of particular grace and loveliness that can be, for a moment, heartbreaking . . . On the one hand, we are delighted by an awareness of how life should more often be; on the other, we are pained by an acute sense that our own life is not usually like this.”
- Alain de Botton in Art as Therapy

Alain de Botton goes on to say that idealized beauty in art does not ignore the brutal realities of life in an attempt to retreat from them into sentimentality. Rather, the artist is all too aware of the hard struggles of existence and chooses to express beauty and hope in order to encourage us away from de…