It was a brief conversation, but it confirmed for me what I had suspected for some time: there was no place for me in the world of visual arts. I had chosen to study art because I enjoyed doing it and I was good at drawing and painting, but as part of my degree, eighteen course hours were spent in the study of art history. Those hours of slide lectures and reading taught me much, but not enough.

On the one hand, the courses were a blessing. For the first time in my life I got the big-picture overview of the history of Western Civilization, from the ancient cultures to post-modernism. Due to that course of study I also came to realize that the arts, were a window or reflection of the philosophy and worldview of the artists’ time, or at least those philosophies that were deemed new or “relevant” by the historians.

Observing this story of the arts and of the minds of men, I found that I disagreed firmly with the trajectory of their ideas in the late twentieth century. They reduced the conversation to overblown trivia or grotesque assaults to the senses. They had turned their backs on the greater community of human beings from whom they desired reverence but gave not so much as a crumb of decent pleasure to.

Such was the tone of my thoughts on the whole enterprise that day during my final semester when I asked the most approachable of my professors the question that I could find no answer for: “why make art?” She was understandably taken off guard by the question, and did her best. “Some people make art to express themselves…” is the only part that sticks in memory, though there was a bit more than that, but nothing convincing. Navel gazing, challenging the last guy’s assertions – that was all that was left. I thanked her and extricated myself. And that moment stands like a column marking the division between the time when I was pursing being an artist and the time when that idea was officially dead to me.

At the ripe age of twenty-three I “knew” that the art intelligentsia was the last word on what would be considered valuable or important and I also knew we did not share the same values. I did not want to fight the establishment, and besides I had already chosen my next vocation.  I was married and had a newborn; there was no motivation for reconciliation.

Years later I was an adult convert of maybe eight years, relearning how to look at life, the universe and everything and I had begun teaching my home-schooled children’s peers how to draw. Drawing is a useful skill, a pleasurable one, and good for exercising the brain in new ways, and so I offered it from that angle. I did not call it “art class” and discouraged parents from doing so. This was a pragmatic, simple class: Drawing.

As we know, teaching forces you to think about a subject from scratch. So I was revisiting all my old feelings and assumptions and reading the thought of art critics of the past, something never offered in my state college. Still, I could not find a cohesive theory of the meaning or purpose of art. Perhaps this was due to the fact that the oldest thoughts I had managed to lay hands on dated back merely to the Enlightenment. Which is about when all the educated people began chucking out all the ancient ideas about things and started making up new ones.

So I don’t know what specifically lead me to the great truth that I had needed for so many years, but I remember I was simply pondering the topic in the quiet of our dining room-studio after the students were gone and a phrase from an old jewelry advertisement wandered into my mind: “Beauty has its reasons” and I was thinking how that had not quite ever made sense.

Suddenly She stood in my mind’s eye, majestic, noble, powerful: Beauty. There she was – reason Enough.  I sat down suddenly struck by the vision and truth and wept. To make something beautiful, to do something beautifully, that was all the reason one needed, Ever.

Does not God himself do the most amazing things for no other reason than the sheer Beauty of it? Consider the stars and moon! And someone explain why the ocean must be so Ravishing! Sun sets and rises, though no artist can do them justice, hit you in the very soul. And didn’t He make us in his likeness? don’t we enjoy bringing into existence something which was not there before? And don’t we always make our things to be shared? Always. And isn’t the beautiful thing like a blessing in solid form, something which lifts the heart just by being?

Is it not beauty the ornament of all Truth?  Oh, Beauty, where had you been all these years? Why could I not see you were the reason all along?

“Because my dear child, those who trained your thinking did not want me. They could not bear me in their brave new world. They could not define, measure or quantify me and so they said I was not real. They dismissed me to the “eye of the beholder” which means beauty is nothing more than preference. So they denied my autonomy and authority. And you, poor thing, you couldn’t see me until the scales of the ugly stingy world were washed away and you were ready to look with new eyes.”