My favourite quote from Allan Ramsay is: "People don't plant ugly flowers." He makes a good point when he asks "Why do people come to Brighton Beach?" He states that people come down from London to Brighton to see the beautiful sea, sky and sand [stones rather]. And this is an excellent point which has also been stated by my academic mentor Helen Kennedy: their simply must be some agreement amongst people in general that the sun setting over the sea is beautiful. Does this not suggest some sort of objectivity to beauty? If so, then how can beauty be entirely subjective, as is enforced as a concept by so many practitioners of art in our current era? Are those subjectivists – as I like to label them – possibly mistaken in their fascist, anti-beauty dogma? Or is beauty purely relative as they so forcefully emphasize?
Jesse Waugh
Brighton Butterfly: Red Admiral
2014
Oil on canvas
14
