Walking through the woods on a path, fall colors emerging, first puddles of the season on the trail. I recognize that it’s very easy to find beauty in Nature. The shapes and forms that She shows us are beautiful in their perfect imperfection, in their diversity, and in their individual uniqueness. If we stop to see the leaves and trees; the colors and flowers and berries; the imperfectly shaped everything – we see beauty everywhere. Same on the waterfront with the beauty of ocean waves, the clouds, all of the light, that changes constantly. We also recognize beauty in animals, and the faces of other humans, in our lovers, our children, our friends – in all their alleged imperfections. They, and we, are part of Nature, too.
Whether we believe it all came from a Creator God, or from the Evolution of variation and selection from an explosion of energy becoming matter at the speed of light, or that it is simply This Now – Nature is beautiful in a compelling and mysterious way. Thus, we have the nature poets, painters, filmmakers, photographers, and naturalists. We love natural beauty. We love finding and displaying beauty in so many ways.
It is considerably more challenging for us humans to create objects and displays that are beautiful, with lines and shapes rather than the fuzziness of Nature. We often see beauty, but creating objects that elicit the “beauty response” is an entirely different matter. Just any old lines or shapes won’t do. They won’t all produce the “beauty response” in humans.
That’s part of the mastery of great architects, such as Hossein Amanat, who designs beautiful buildings and monuments with the lines of human architecture. There are a lot of curves, and he draws much from classical Persian, Greek and Middle Eastern architecture. But he has also designed stunningly beautiful buildings with modern lines and sensibilities, integrating classical beauty seamlessly. He includes space and shapes and proportions that align with the great discoveries about beauty and emotion among those who have been designing structures for thousands of years. Seeing and creating beauty is an ancient art, based on ancient geometry and engineering. Frank Lloyd Wright was another great one, and his creations had a lot of sharp lines. Interestingly, though, his buildings were often couched in Nature, almost part of it.
We humans have to work at creating Beauty. Nature just is beautiful!