Where Beauty Is - March 2026

The moon, deep into the night, shines through a Courbet green atmosphere of trees. Color is barely perceptual and the shapes of individual trees meld into masses. Moths move through warm moist air along with the sound of crickets and wings beating. A bat or an owl or maybe a nighthawk, I wonder.? Mysterious rustles in the undergrowth; below the moon is a small still pond fragrant with wet leaves.

There is ambiguity in this painting that I first feel in the body. A serenity or a longing to be in this place. Possibly some trepidation. There is much I cannot see.
Why have I placed a small pond in the center of this painting? I couldn’t explain why when it first appeared. I am still not sure. It might be a memory of sneaking upon a small pond in a field where by chance I saw a pair of Red Headed ducks.
When I was painting Moon in the Woods I consciously decided to remain open to unexpected possibilities. I resisted my own habit of rationalizing color and shapes. See what happens… you can always paint over it…. I kept telling myself. Painting Moon in the Woods felt much like a poetic process of uncovering.
What do I mean by a poetic process? What makes a painting poetic? All poetic forms whether words on a page or painted images, generate a special indeterminacy, a type of ambiguity that leaves an opening for possibilities, for transformation. This open space makes room for a poiesis or a ‘bringing-forth” of something that did not exist before. It is these unknown parts which did not exist before that thrill me the most. It is in this new space that I find Beauty. 

Last year during an online class called Imaging New Worlds I was turned on to a book by scholar and self described indigenous scientartist, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, called Hospicing Modernity. More than any other book I’ve ever read she has helped me rethink many of the political crisis’ happening today. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira writes that we are living in a modernity that is dying all around us. Technology and capitalism had never cared for the earth or it’s people. She contends that men in power aim to control, to rank, to data collect, to market, to reduce our desires to “like”, to extract and consume, and advance a life in direct opposition to one interconnected with nature and art.
How do you and I live in a world like this? Oliveira suggests we live our lives:

as a spiritual ceremony where your relationship with unknownability and indeterminacy becomes more important than trying to fix the world into forms that can be categorized, ordered, ranked, and controlled.

This world of indeterminacy and the unknowable is filled with mysteries and possibilities and is where Beauty can be found. Even when faced with dire and deeply stressful environmental decline and multiple crisis happening at the same time Beauty still vibrates all around us. Beauty quivers in the forests and shorelines. Paintings covey Beauty. Poems and literature give voice to Beauty. By living with handmade objects that we hold in our hands, looking at paintings, reading poems and literature, and listening to birds songs and musicians playing music, we usher Beauty into our life.
When I experience beauty, in the woods or in front of Bonnard’s Garden painting at the Met my mood and my thinking is changed. Beauty changes my consciousness. I am changed. Art opens doors to the imagination, to the possible.

Richard Kooyman March 2026