The Child in the House (exerpt),  by David Carrier

"It is false to suppose that a child's sense of beauty is dependent on any choiceness or special fineness, in the objects which present themselves to it, though this indeed comes to be the rule with most of us in later life; earlier, in some degree, we see inwardly . . . ."
Walter Pater

The Child in the House
Visual experience plays a central role in the everyday lives of only a few people.
In their autobiographical writings, Praeterita and "The Child in the House," John Ruskin and Walter Pater tell how they, raised in philistine homes, became visually sensitive.
In philistine Victorian England, that was no easy task.
Bill Beckley, who was born in 1946, grew up in a very different but equally philistine culture.
His aesthetic, conceived in large part by early experiences with photography, was formed in the late 1960s.
And so it is interesting that in the 1990s, after a highly productive three-decade-long career as a working artist, he published texts by Ruskin and Pater.
In trying to understand his art and life, you could do worse than to begin with his introductions to those books.

I chose that combination of authors because whatever their differences in the philosophy of art and poetry at Oxford in the early 1870s-Ruskin a proponent of art linked to social evolution, and Pater proclaiming in The Renaissance art for art's sake-a sense of beauty united them.

The sense of beauty, or what Beckley calls "belief in the value of human pleasure, those fleeting moments in human experience that are expansive, such as when a child appreciates the colors and transparencies of Lego," is the basis, also, for his own art.
His goal is to recover the living value of that way of thinking, in an unacademic way.
No one is born an aesthete, and in our culture few parents train their children to be aesthetes.
How then do some people come to make art the source of their values?
Bill Beckley offers an oddly straightforward answer to that question.

I decided to become an artist when I was five after I found a couple of my father's pastel drawings, one of his dog and another of a parrot, stored away in a cabinet.
I understood even then that some everyday objects of life were more important than others.

Read more