Beauty is challenging to define. Entire books have been written in an effort to define this mystery. I have spent several years trying to understand what beauty is and what it does. I have gazed across the Grand Canyon and wondered why my heart feels stronger. I have stood before Niagara Falls and pondered the joy that welled up in me. As I have read and pondered on the subject, I realize that there is vastly more to say about it than I know. And there are many who understand this topic far better than I do. So it is with humility that I offer this definition. 

I have come to understand that beauty has three essential elements: Beauty is that which is 1) pleasing to the eye and heart 2) through its design 3) and surprise. Pleasing, design, surprise. 

To begin, beauty is pleasing to us.  Thomas Aquinas described beauty as “that which is pleasing when seen.” It produces an emotion in us, not just any emotion but emotions that fall into the broad category of “pleasant to the eye and heart.” My friend Rick Atwell taught professional dance for years, and he would tell his students, “No emotion, no art.” A good dancer touches your emotions in a positive way. The arts have a way of bypassing our reasoning and touching our heart. 

The second element of beauty is design. Design means the parts are arranged in an orderly way. One of my favorite birds is the cardinal. A cardinal is beautiful because of its design, the arrangement of its parts and colors. If you scrambled its parts, it would lose its beauty (I don’t recommend that). The feathers, head, beak and legs are ordered, put together in a precise way that we find visually pleasing. 

Design also implies that the parts are not only ordered, but they are ordered as they should be. No parts are missing, or in the wrong place. If the cardinal were missing a wing, the sight would no longer thrill our hearts. It would probably make us sad. If we re-attached the wing by glueing it to the top of his head, that wouldn’t help. For the cardinal to shine in all its beauty, it needs to have all of its parts, and the parts need to be arranged in the right order. Only then do we see the true beauty of a cardinal. 

But order is not the whole picture; the element of surprise is needed. That is the third element of beauty. The cardinal’s flash of hot red against the backdrop of muted backyard colors makes my heart sing. The surprise of seeing that brilliant red at my feeder never gets old. 

Without design we have chaos. Without surprise we are bored. Beauty needs both. I find that nearly all of my colleagues in the art profession admire painters who have a firm grasp of the elements of art and who are willing to take risks with compositions and colors and brushwork. In other words, they are good designers, and they are bold enough to create an element of surprise, to do something unusual. 

I often do a painting where something feels out of place or missing. Solving those visual problems is a process of getting all the parts working together. Something in the painting that should be secondary is screaming at me visually, trying to be “the star of the show.” Something that should be more important lacks the visual punch it needs. When I get a painting whose parts all work together well, that is immensely satisfying. Those paintings are rarely hard to sell. 

Other times I do a painting where all the parts are there, but it lacks the surprise element. It is too predictable. My struggle to adjust the painting then becomes an attempt to spice it up, give it drama, excitement. The order and design is there, but it needs more surprise. 

Even a healthy relationship needs both design and surprise, familiarity and the unexpected. A woman’s mystique is that element of surprise that men find so alluring. But a woman who is nothing but surprises and no familiarity might rather be termed exhausting, even baffling. Like a good perfume, mystique comes in small amounts. In large doses it resembles a stroll through a perfume factory. 

A beautiful work of art, then, is something painted, drawn, built or sculpted that pleases us with its design and surprise.