Bernie Boy Learns to See Beauty

Coming of Age. Dad drove me down to Urbana, Illinois, to Robert Allerton Park, a spectacularly landscaped and huge old estate built by its namesake for his betrothed who bolted at the altar and broke his heart. He never married and eventually gave the whole place to the University of Illinois. I went there because I had been selected by the Women’s Club of Illinois for a week of art classes to be given by some of the art leaders of the day. I was sixteen years old. An art professor art teacher from the University of Illinois, Robert Raushenberger, was the most important one to me because I learned something I used all my life from him. This is what I wrote down about it and saved to this day: “To create art you have to be able to see the beauty in the world, and then capture what you’ve seen so others can see it. That beauty, when presented through your art, is Truth, and that truth will be known by anyone who looks at it.” The trouble was, as he told us all this, he was showing us some of his own very abstract paintings. I thought they were beautiful, but they were not about anything I could identify. What in the world was this man talking about? I found out the next day when I carried an ordinary rock from a path to his lecture and aimlessly played with it as he spoke. He took that rock from my hand, looked at it, and saw a whole universe in it. Softly, but tersely, he spoke of its texture, its color, its relationship to the light, and abstract associations the rock made him think of, like the time he picked a piece of loose gravel from the wall of a tenth century English castle. Then he said, “It’s very simple. Everything has beauty if you can see it. How to see beauty is based on the association you make with what you see.” Observing beauty is every artist’s secret skill. After fifty-some years of practicing “seeing,” a walk anywhere is explosively rich with artistic possibilities. I am so grateful to have lived my life with this skill, though sometimes the beauty instills an awe of life within me that is so wonderful I can barely stand it. I’m still trying to learn why that is. Maybe it’s because I fear that is what I will miss the most when I die. It was a pyrotechnic week, artistically. I made two great friends, one boy, and one girl, and wanted it to never end. When Dad came to pick me up, he took one look at me and asked in his always-blunt way, “Did they forget to feed you?” I had lost weight and was extra tan. How could I possible explain to Dad that we had stayed up all night several times that week walking the miles of beautiful trails of the estate just being arty, admiring all the statues, the architecture, the sunrises, the gorgeous gardens, and all the while talking about being artists. It was all so thrilling. How could I tell Dad his son, Bernie Boy, had been immersed in beauty?