It pays to ask. Answers come to those who do.

When I was a kid, I asked myself exactly what beauty is.

Decades passed before I got an answer, and it left me unable to produce art for months.

At age 10 I assumed it would amount to angles and spatial relationships and shapes. I wasn’t far off from seeing it and yet I wasn’t even close to understanding.

Hints came and went. Sayings allude to it. I wondered if people all over the country had the answer that I was diligently seeking.

For me, it was a formula that I expected to be one day revealed and I just wanted to have it.

Meanwhile I still looked for the answer.

One day, I passed a little white car in the teachers parking lot at school. The shape and size of the thing affected me amazingly. It was so new to me that the sight of something could be that visceral.

To my bones I felt this beautiful response to seeing that dinky British roadster. Two more years of school and a half a year in a tech school later I felt it again. That time it was at the sight of a dark green roadster. Within months I’d located one of my very own and bought it from a retiring fellow.

Cars were never the same in my life after that and though it’s cost me a lot of money and time, there are worse passions to spend one’s attentions on.

Sketches of cars proliferated my little collection from that time forward. They weren’t alone. I drew and painted landscapes and loved it. I drew girls and women.

When I attended art school I expected to find the answer to my inquiry, but it was never addressed. Instead, ways to achieve it were taught. “Achieve” means to address it recognizably.

Still, I was puzzled. So many artists that we studied in the history class had no concept of beauty that I could comprehend. Others could produce it, but seemed not to esteem it when they did (judging by what I found in waste baskets).

I was in middle age when the answer came to me, and I didn’t want to believe it. As time passed, I understood better, and was fine with it.

Many other art questions remain in me. Over the process of time, one by one, they are being answered. Knowledge is good, even if it sets one back a bit at first.