Process Artmaking and the Apreciation of Beauty.

updated 3/12/2025

 

What is process artmaking? The great painter Grace Hartigan said it simply…” I am a process artist…you start out with an idea; ideas keep coming as your creating and eventually the painting tells you what it wants.” An idea can be the impetus for the painting but is not intended to be the end point. It’s the creative process itself that gets full permission to take whatever turns it wants, often bringing the artist to a place of surprise and amazement.

Some process teachers tell their students that beauty has nothing to do with this process because the intention to make something beautiful can derail the process which is after truth and not necessarily beauty. Beauty, of course is in the eye of the beholder, in my mind if a work has the ring of truth or is an authentic expression of the heart it is naturally a thing of beauty.

But beauty in the traditional sense of the word is not something to be averse too either. My observations over the years in process painting studios tells me that sometimes an artist suffers from too little input from the outside. The result can be repetition and an over reliance on ones limited visual vocabulary.

In my classes I offer a middle ground between process art making, aesthetic appreciation and dialoging with imagery. We create a safe container grounded in deep listening to help open the intuitive heart. For me our inherent thirst for beauty naturally dovetails with the longing for expressive freedom and spiritual inquiry. As an art school graduate and longtime artist, the process approach opened me to the joy of making art from my child’s eye perspective and brought my awareness to the judgements that held back my creativity and blindsided me to my habitual choices. This training or untraining was invaluable to me but it did seem to have its limitations. I observed an unconscious conformity of style in many process painting classes although the work was more often than not wonderfully rich in emotional content.

How does one keep that valuable content while opening up the gates to a wider cast of influences, formal qualities, painting modes and movements that most untrained or even trained artists are not aware of?

One of my art professors used to say “As an artist you don’t live in a vacuum”. He was preaching the importance of visual vocabularies and aesthetic appreciation of artwork whatever their source from pop culture to ‘outsider’ artists, to great masters of the past. I value the exposure I’ve had to master artists of the past not all of them trained artists and feel I have something to offer those who would like to learn more about how to appreciate the language of painting. In my online classes I use the work of great artists as inspiration that can sprout new ideas for students. We can’t do it all though so we pick and choose the influences that appeal to our individual temperament and this can vary over time. Art that does not relate specifically to our work of the moment still informs our hearts and minds and can awake something in us that may blossom further down the line.

Unpredictable relationships happen when we see work that is outside our limited purview. We are inspired to grow into ourselves by seeing what others have done in the past. If you’re an amateur or untrained artist you usually allow yourself freedom to grow and experiment, on the other hand many professionals, by virtue of their connection to the market place find that to be challenging. Trained artists and professionals can benefit from dipping into that place of freedom and experimentation.

We live in an unprecedented time where exposure to great art from the past and from a variety of cultures is there at our fingertips on the keyboard. The danger of this easy access is that we become overwhelmed by brilliant works of the past and present that can inhibit our native imagination. The balance hangs between the two extremes of overexposure to inspiring art and the limited palette of our own inventions. There are seasons in our artistic life that naturally move within this spectrum of opening outwards and honing our personal craft.

Ultimately, I’m not alone in thinking that appreciating beauty is a key element of psychological wellness. It lifts us up and inspires us. If we ignore the gifts of our artistic legacy from other times, we impoverish ourselves as artists and as a culture.

As the artist and writer Martin Prechtel say’s, in these dark times our task as artists/artisans is to preserve the seeds of the healing, fine and domestic arts that have been passed down to us for a future time when humanity has the opportunity to appreciate them and bring them more fully into flower. One of these arts is the ability to see, feel and understand artwork and thereby enhance our creative imagination. The world thirsts for the soul’s authentic and uniquely personal expression. Recognizing our deepest self in making or appreciating art open us to the great universal heart and this has always been the highest function of art.