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Aesthetic Realism & Our Lives

Ann Richards & Christopher Balchin

 

 

HOW CAN WE HAVE TRUE CONFIDENCE?       

by Christopher Balchin

Aesthetic Realism explains that in art is the answer to this question which I thought I would never be able to answer, and which affects every person: How can I be truly sure of myself?

           

When I first saw Claude Monet?s Sunflowers I was struck by its bold colors and energy--the yellow-orange of the flowers, the lush green leaves, the surprising bright red tablecloth, and the vibrant pink and green background.*  I am learning that the reason it stirs me so is that it does what I want to do as a person.  "All beauty," Eli Siegel stated, "is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves."  What Eli Siegel explained in this principle of Aesthetic Realism meets the deepest hopes of people.  In this painting the boldness I saw at first is at one with modesty.  Assertiveness and tremulousness are put together in every stroke of paint on the canvas.

 Growing up in Ashford, Kent, England, I cursed myself over and over again for my lack of confidence.  I felt that I was smart and had lots of ability, but I couldn't put myself forward and stand up for my ideas.  I remember feeling nervous just before going into a shop, trying to plan ahead of time what I would say to the clerk.  I tried to avoid speaking in classes at school, hoping the teacher wouldn't call on me.  I felt this awful unsureness made me different from everyone else, and I thought it would be with me forever.  Fortunately, in 1982 I began to study Aesthetic Realism. The three men I was learning from in consultations were kind, interested in what I thought, and asked me questions that had depth and also humour. This is an excerpt from that first fifty-minute discussion that I treasure:  

          Consultants:                  Do you think you're too tentative?
          Christopher Balchin:   Oh, yes...
          Consultants:                  What can be done about it?
          CB:                                   I need to be more decisive . . .?
          Consultants:                   Do you also have a side of you that's stubborn?
          CB:                                    Yes!
          Consultants:                   These are opposites.
 
I was amazed. I had really never thought of myself as having both these opposite qualities at the same time. Furthermore, both my stubbornness and my tentativeness, I learned, came from contempt, which Eli Siegel described as the "disposition in every person to think he will be for himself by making less of the outside world."  I felt superior and I wanted to hold out on a world I saw as confusing, ill-made, and against me.  I learned that I punished myself for this unjust way of seeing by being very tentative and unsure.
 
Monet's Sunflowers puts together beautifully boldness and timidity, sureness and unsureness.  The vase is slender and light, almost precarious, yet it supports that mass of flowers spilling out and thrusting upward from it.  The sunflowers, as they rise and fall are a beautiful relation of assertiveness and modesty, not the uneasy combination of braggadocio and limpness I used to have.  The flower in the center at the back looks very upright, shining out like a flaming sun at midday.  Yet it has delicate, tapering petal-tips, and the stem that supports it curves gracefully upwards from the right, the leaves giving the appearance of a ballerina in mid-leap.  Together, the effect is beautiful, and you get a sense of how different aspects of a self can be composed.
 
Before studying Aesthetic Realism I never knew there was any relation between my feeling superior and arrogant to my feeling so unsure and afraid of people.  Some moments I would feel I could do anything--be a millionaire, write the great English novel, survive in a desert or jungle better than anyone else; other moments I felt tremendous despair and self-doubt.  The artist, I learned, does not want to feel superior to reality, as I did--he wants to be fair to it.
 
In an interview on WKCR radio in 1963, Eli Siegel explained what Monet was going after:
 
Monet made the vague, the uncertain, the trembling triumphant.  The Impressionists saw reality as possible dancing...Monet was looking to have gravity shimmer. He was looking to have edges less tidy.  This is a noble desire--to have reality not just tidy, not just fixed, not just massive, but to have it tremble even as it persists.  The Impressionists were awfully ethical.            
 
In this painting, tremulousness is made glorious, majestic, triumphant.  The bright red tablecloth, which we expect to be fixed and solid, has a green, blue, and gray pattern with waves of color rising and falling.  The edges, which we think of as tidy, Monet paints with rising strokes of vermilion and gray that lick upward like tongues of fire.
 
One part of the painting I particularly care for is the single, very dark leaf drooping and twirling down just to the left of the vase.  It looks mysterious in the shadows.  It is lower than any other leaf, looking a little bit like a person can feel at his most unsure and self-deprecating.  But without it, the mass of flowers becomes unsteady.  That one leaf anchors and joins the arrangement above and the table below.  It is a oneness of sureness and unsureness, tremulousness and persistence.
 
Then Monet does this magnificent, surprising thing:  he places the massive, sprawling arrangement of flowers in a diamond form--the same as the dark pattern in the tablecloth, and the table itself.  The wild, the rambling, the uneven have the same form as what is solid and steady, the foundation--and it is beautiful. 

Eli Siegel has explained for the first time what makes a work of art beautiful. Through the principles of Aesthetic Realism every person can learn what beauty can teach us about our own lives.

* * * * *

*This reproduction, which I like generally, makes the background somewhat bluer and less green than it is in the original.

For another talk on how Aesthetic Realism sees the work of Claude Monet, go to the website of essayist Ruth Oron.

 

Here are further links about how Aesthetic Realism sees the arts & sciences, urgent cultural and economic matters, ethics, and the life questions of every person:

Anthropologist and author Dr. Arnold Perey tells of his field research in New Guinea and the classes he teaches today--and much more--at Aesthetic Realism: A New Perspective for Anthropology

For teachers, parents, and others, here are links that will tell you more about the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method:

What makes a photograph beautiful? How can a photographer improve his or her work? What does the art of photography have to do with justice to people? Find out at Len Bernstein: Photographic Education Based on the Aesthetic Realism of Eli Siegel

Some of Eli Siegel's books, essays, lectures, and poems can be read at The Aesthetic Realism Online Library  Also, see what critics have said about Aesthetic Realism and Eli Siegel. 

Aesthetic Realism Associate Lynette Abel tells here about classes she attended taught by Eli Siegel, reports on classes conducted by Ellen Reiss, and reprints some of the newspaper articles she has written: Lynette Abel: Aesthetic Realism and Life

What interferes with our expression? Find out at Aesthetic Realism Encourages Self-Expression the website of Miriam Mondlin

Read Ellen Reiss's critical observations about the poetry of Robert Burns (one of our favourite poets). She shows how relevant what Burns was writing about 200 years ago is to what is going on today. His poetry has the terrifically just way of seeing people that is needed by government leaders and every one of us.

Aesthetic Realism explains that in order to really respect any person, whether someone of another culture or your own husband or wife, is to see that person as representing nothing less than the world itself. How can we see a person that way? Look at Eli Siegel's Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites? Ask yourself, does this person have opposites? Do they have every one of these fifteen pairs? (And more besides?) Is he/she trying to make sense of how they have these opposites?

Injustice can certainly be based on race, but it can also be based simply on seeing another person's way of meeting the world as different from one's own, and therefore less valuable. And about this, a person can be monumentally wrong. A classic instance of this in literary history is taken up by Ellen Reiss in relation to the great poet John Keats. And she shows the immediate relevance of this mis-seeing to our own lives and time.

One of our favourite links is to syndicated columnist Alice Bernstein. Her writing against racism has Aesthetic Realism as its basis.

To see what Aesthetic Realism is--and what it is not--see the website devoted to accuracy, honesty, justice--the plain truth!: Countering the Lies.

 

 

 

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