To Live With Beauty

How's that for an aspiration? One among many to be sure, but a very pleasant one, isn't it? To seek to surround oneself with beauty. So that at every turn within one's home the eyes encounter objects of interest and beauty. Expressing human creativity; doesn't that approach the essence of the divine? Beauty is a diversion, a soft pillow of comfort when one feels troubled. Beauty as a goal, to create a pattern, an arras of contemplation, recognition of fine design and colour meeting in joyful companionship.

Well, I like the idea of it. What's more I enjoy the reality of it. We are surrounded by beauty in this home we share, my husband and I. He has always expressed his own aesthetic, his appreciation for objects and even less tangible, more tenuous appearances such as those seen fleetingly in nature. Those creations meant to emulate nature, those devices which humans use to produce things of beauty surround us and give us immeasurable pleasure.

He has always sought out things of singular and pleasurable beauty. Where does this proclivity arise out of? It's there, no doubt, in greater or lesser degree in most human beings; an appreciation for the beauty that surrounds us in nature and by extension by the efforts in the plastic arts of humans seeking to emulate nature. It's there in music, in dance, in the architecture of our cities and most particularly so in the architecture of past ages everywhere.

Unique and creative, natural and human-designed surroundings, items of pleasure. From the jewellery that we wear, and the clothing that cover us, from the homes we select and the furnishings we crowd them with, from the paintings on our walls to the textiles we choose, we seek our idea of perfection to surround ourselves with beauty. Some are able to instinctively identify the symmetry of design, colour and presence.

My husband is one of those. Through his interest in providing us with objects through purchase, and through his own abilities, anywhere our gaze turns in our home it finds beauty. From the paintings he produces himself on canvass, to those he procures, from the infrastructure changes and embellishments he has himself built into this house that is our home, he personalizes and beautifies it.

If I were to choose one single train of effort he expends to pursue and create an atmosphere of beauty it would be with his dedication to the use of coloured glass. Landscapes of coloured glass come alive as only glass, viewed through the medium of varying day-time to evening light can do, presenting to the viewer a vision of ever-changing meaning; coloured glass glimmers and glows, recedes and brightens as the element of light itself changes throughout the day.

How personally pleasing and comforting it is to have these landscapes at eye's-breadth everywhere we turn.