“Some
people choose to see the ugliness in this world, the disarray. I choose to see
the beauty.” Since the dawn of the human race, we
have always been captivated by beauty. With the rains washing over Namibia, we
all have experienced that graceful bliss that envelops us when we see the
effect is has on our thirsty land.
It should thus be of no surprise that we
have always sought to capture beauty in any form possible. In the beginning,
all we had rudimentary pigments, and crude tools, but still we tried to capture
and record the beauty we saw in the world. With pigments on rock, we captured
as much as was possible. Here in Namibia, our busmen paintings, such as the
White Lady, provides evidence of this.
As humanity progressed, our tools and
materials became more complex, and we could capture beauty more effectively. As
a result, we could not only capture the beauty as it appears, but also as we imagine
it to be – we could be creative. We could create art.
Our first foray into busmen paintings
blossomed into a veritable portmanteau of skills with which we could capture
the beauty of a moment. From the White Lady, we progressed to Leonardo Da Vinci’s
Mona Lisa, and Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. But these forms
captured beauty in a two dimensional plane, and sometimes that’s not enough for
an artist. In parallel, another form of art developed – sculpture. First done
with ceramics, made from clay and developing from pottery, it soon expanded
into a form all of its own, with Michelangelo’s David probably the most well-known of these.
Still, these forms could only capture a
moment, and too often, beauty last more than a moment. While we had yet to
develop the technological sophistication to be up to the task, we harnessed
that other master computer we all carry with us – the human brain. We turned
more abstract, letting the human intellect and imagination fill in that which
we could not capture. We began recording narratives with words, enabling a
story to be told. We invented literature, and poetry.
As we went abstract, we found beauty in
even more things. The abstract world of mathematics opened up for us, and as
Bertrand Russell said, “Mathematics,
rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold
and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker
nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely
pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.
The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man,
which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics
as surely as poetry.”
Being capable of recording the abstract
enabled us to record the ineffable – music. By developing musical notation,
those sublime notes that touch the heart could now be spread far and wide, and
as the centuries progressed, we had more and more instruments to strum the
strings of emotion with. Beauty had come to pierce the soul of humanity.
Lest it be said that we started to rest on
our laurels, we continued to progress technologically, and new forms of art
opened up to capture the beauty of this world. We used the literary arts to ‘replay,’
as it were, the events recorded, and the theatre opened up to the world. Master
of the theatre, William Shakespeare, certainly left his legacy there. And when
theatre used music instead of literature as a basis, we got the musical.
Soon, we could capture beauty perfectly,
via a new-fangled invention called the camera, which produced photographs. We
had, however, become used to artists enhancing beauty, and when cameras were
developed that could film moving pictures, another art form emerged – the
movie. But it was not only the visual arts that got an upgrade. Soon, a device
emerged that allowed for the visualization of mathematics – the computer. It
too, spawned its own form of art, as immortalized in Donald Knuth’s volumes on The Art of Computer Programming.
And so, the great convergence began. Movies
were combined with drawing, and animation began, with Walt Disney’s
masterpieces sure to be seen by many a child. Drawing combined with literature,
and the graphic novel emerged, culminating in the legends of today’s comic
books, such as Jack Kirby and Frank Miller. Computer programming and literature
combined to produce interactive novels. When they combined with drawing, the
video game made its debut.
Today, we are all conversant with capturing
beauty. Social media is filled with photographs and videos of people capturing
remarkable moments across the world, and sharing them with friends and family.
Even as this is occurring, we are discovering new ways to capture the beauty of
this world – sculpture is today done via 3D printing and its modelling is
instrumental in moving the art of video games beyond a 2D plane on a screen
into the 3D virtual reality devices slowly coming into prominence.
Beauty is all around us, if you just know
where to look. Once you choose to see the beauty in this world, you’ll find
that you feel spaces opening up inside you, like a building with rooms you’ve
never explored. It’s time you started exploring, for there is much to discover
yet.
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