On Less Obvious Beauty
Artists do not always depict what is obviously beautiful or aesthetically valuable. And a great artist can create an extraordinary work of art from aspects of their ordinary experience that might easily be overlooked. By engaging with their art, we, too, can learn to see and attend to what is depicted in their work. In this post, I want to consider the role that the arts play in prompting us to appreciate beauty, and other aesthetic qualities, that might otherwise go unnoticed. While artists are not required to depict less obvious objects of aesthetic attention, they can often help us recognize and appreciate them through their work.
Early in Osamu Dazai’s novel, No Longer Human, the main character, Yozo Oba, who enjoyed drawing and painting in high school, voices frustration with the lack of attention given to his expressive works of art. He writes:
What superficiality—and what stupidity—there is in trying to depict in a pretty manner things which one has thought pretty. The masters through their subjective perceptions created beauty out of trivialities. They did not hide their interest even in things which were nauseatingly ugly, but soaked themselves in the pleasure of depicting them. (55)
In this view, it is silly—a waste of time, even—to paint pretty pictures of pretty things. The masters create great works of art out “trivialities” – the ordinary and unimportant. They at times even dwell in the ugly, enjoying the process of depicting such things.
Before I explore what I take to be right and compelling about this passage, I want to address what I take to be wrong about it. Surely it is an overstatement to say or imply that the masters never depict the pretty in a pretty way. For example, Michelangelo’s David and Botticelli’s Venus both take as their subject matter beautiful examples of the human form. And countless other talented painters have captured the obvious beauty of landscapes (Claude Monet), flowers (Rachel Ruysch), city scenes (Gustave Caillebotte), and interiors (Édouard Vuillard ). To be sure, who counts as a “master” is a vexing and controversial question in its own right, and we know that our judgment here may be prone to biases and prejudices of various kind. But it only takes one case, of course, to disprove a general rule, and there are few out there who would deny the artistic mastery of Michelangelo.
Still, we do sometimes look down upon certain obvious depictions of beauty because they appear trite, cliché, or formulaic. Think here of the safe or conventional paintings that one might find in a hotel or dentist’s office of, say, a beautiful sunset, or southern seascape. Often what we dislike or about such paintings is the obviousness of their subject matter. In the world of music, an example might be so-called elevator music or the adult contemporary station—music that is pleasant, perhaps, but generic, insipid, and unoriginal.
What is right about Yozo’s claim is that artists can make great works from trivialities and thereby transform the way that we see the world. Vincent van Gogh, for example, painted plenty of pretty things, including landscapes, sunflowers, and—most famously of all—the majestic starry sky. But he also painted ordinary objects from his everyday life, capturing their beauty with his artist’s eye. His painting of shoes is wonderful example of this. Apparently, van Gogh bought the old working shoes at a flea market and walked through the mud in them until they were filthy. Only after doing so did he judge them to be sufficiently interesting to paint.
A set of related philosophical questions arises here: Do we take the van Gogh’s painting of shoes to be beautiful? Do we also take the subject matter to be beautiful? Or simply interesting? It is possible that our answers to these questions will diverge. For my part, I would say that van Gogh’s painting of the shoes is beautiful; he reveals a certain rustic beauty or charm in the old, worn-out shoes. But, perhaps, more than this, he calls attention to the visual interest of his subject matter. As he so keenly observed, the shoes are incredibly interesting to look at, with their wabi-sabi aesthetic, their visible age and history. Van Gogh took something ordinary or trivial and transformed it into a great work of art.
There are other painters who, like van Gogh, chose subjects whose beauty is not obvious or at least in keeping with society’s standards of beauty. Traditionally, numerous still life painters have captured the beauty of ordinary objects. Consider, for example, Jean Simeon Chardin’s painting of Still Life with a White Mug, or, as I mentioned in a previous post, Édouard Manet’s A Bundle of Asparagus. These painters set ordinary objects in dramatic lighting, paint them in a sensitive and expressive way, and thereby capture our attention—transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. As Yozo would put it, they create “beauty out of trivialities.” In doing so, they encourage us to take a closer look at the humble constituents of our reality.
As I mentioned in my last post, Georgia O’Keefe explored this theme in her own work and writing. Flowers, she observed, are obvious examples of beauty. And so, many of her viewers preferred that she continue to paint flowers. But she also found beauty in less obvious places, e.g., in the red hill of a dessert scene, or in the bones from deceased animals that she collected there.
Moving beyond paintings of animate objects, some painters have created great works of art from models who do not exemplify society’s narrow standards of beauty. Consider, for example, Lucian Freud’s paintings of large, fleshy women such as, Benefits Supervisor Resting (model, Sue Tilley). He chose not to depict what most viewers would regard as obvious beauty in his paintings, for to do so might not be interesting to himself and his viewers. Then again, it is not clear what Freud wanted viewers to take away from his impressive painterly canvases or what they did take away from them. Minimally, though, we can recognize his ability as a painter and be captivated and drawn in by his portrayals. And many, though not all, would regard Freud as a great painter who painted models whom many might overlook, ignore, or even ridicule.
Take, also, Jenny Saville’s towering, large-scale paintings of female nudes that embrace unidealized forms. Saville does not shy away from capturing every detail of the flesh—dimples, veins, hairs, stretch marks, etc. She says of her early work, “I’m not painting disgusting, big women. I’m painting women who’ve been made to think they’re big and disgusting.” Saville’s work stands in contrast with a history that often depicted the female nude in an idealized, male-gazey, objectified, passive form. She creates great works of art from ordinary, realistic bodies; she was not interested in making pretty pictures from what we all see as pretty things/people.
Again, like Freud, Saville does not seem to be primarily interested in beauty, if she is interested in it at all. Great works of art need not be in the beauty business. An artist may be far more interested in creating a work of art that is alien, ugly, horrifying, or intriguing than “pretty.” Indeed, just as some people take the adjective “nice,” to be a kind of insult to their character, some artist would take “pretty” to be a kind of insult to their work—a diminishment of its true artistic merit.
In her discussion of green aesthetics, Yuriko Saito describes how an understanding of a practice’s environmental impact can affect how we see it. When we understand that, e.g., weedkillers or Roundup can have devastating health and environmental consequences, we come to see the perfect green lawn as cloying—a little bit too green, a little bit too perfect. She writes:
Consider the example of a green lawn. It is typically maintained by a life-support system consisting of the concoction of a toxic brew of herbicide, insecticide, pesticide, and fertilizer, accompanied by the use of tremendous amounts of water that most of us and communities can ill afford, as well as leaf blowing, weed-whacking, all indicating the need for extensive and intensive detox program. Once knowing what is involved in caring for a lawn, it will be irresponsible of us not to incorporate this knowledge into our experience of it. . . . As a result the lawn starts looking somewhat garish, sinister, or morbidly beautiful; at the very least, it definitely will not stay innocently and benignly attractive. (85)
At the same time, we may come to appreciate the comparatively unruly, natural lawn as possessing a wild and untamed beauty of its own— dandelions, clover, and all. Similarly, when we are surrounded by a kind of fakery and beauty culture that seems harmful or toxic, we may come to see unidealized images and people as more interesting, pleasing, and beautiful. When every smile is perfectly straight and white, we may find an outlier—the somewhat imperfect—to be captivating and refreshing. Surely Lucinda Williams shared this sentiment when she languished over her lover’s “sexy crooked teeth,” in her song, “Overtime.”
This is not to say that any of the artists discussed here are trying to reframe or reshape the way that we see and experience beauty and other aesthetic qualities. It is just to say that their art may have this effect upon us. Great art can affect our experience of the world — what we notice, how feel, what we spend time with. It can also influence the questions that we ask and the “filter” or “screen” through which our experiences of the world are viewed or constructed.
Through their depictions, artists can direct our attention—can influence what we see and how we see it. When we stand before a painting in a gallery, we see the world as the artist presents it before our eyes. Although we can never truly experience the world as another does, we may gain insight into how an artist sees the world through their art. Yozo was right: artists can make great works of art out of trivial aspects of our lives. But they can do even more than this: they can create art from the ugly, the comedic, the macabre, the lugubrious, and so forth. And when we engage with their work, we can learn to see and appreciate these aspects of our own experience as well.
Sources:
Dazai, Osamu. No Longer Human. New Directions, 1958.
“Jenny Saville.” The Art Story, The Art Story Foundation, https://www.theartstory.org/artist/saville-jenny/. Accessed 25 Oct. 2025.
Van Gogh Museum. “Shoes (s0011V1962).” Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, 2025, https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/collection/s0011V1962. Accessed 25 Oct. 2025. (https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20150512-is-this-nude-really-shocking).
Saito, Yuriko. Everyday Aesthetics. Oxford University Press, 2007.