The Great Beauty Around Us And Within Us

This post is part of a series on this blog about the beauty that is within us and around us---not what we have to turn on a television or go to a museum to see, but what we and those around us create for our joy and for the joy of those around us.

This comes from Mr. Steve Givens in Kentucky, and I picked it up from the Appalachian Americans Facebook page. Mr. Givens provided a caption that reads "My 2022 Christmas Watercolor, based upon fond memories of my old home place in Green County, Ky. *Merry Christmas to All!"

Now, I interact with many great artists who create their work for friends and families and for their communities and leave it at that. Many would not think of themselves ass artists in the first place, and many do not think of what they create as art. I think that every community or region has its own creative people whose work speaks to and for their regions. Most of these people will remain anonymous. I can see two sides to this. One side is that the work is being created for specific times and places and people and fills certain needs and that needs to be honored. And the artists have a totally justified fear of being taken advantage of by outsiders and of being misunderstood or critiqued. The other side that I can see is that we need to honor these people and save their work because there is never enough beauty in the world. We need help seeing what is right in front of our noses. I wish that we could buy cards or prints of this work but we can't. I also wish that this blog and the internet could better show this work.

Mr. Givens was kind enough to let me post this, and I'm grateful to him to allowing that. I'm sure that some of our readers will rejoice in this as I have.