Beauty

I think I want to create something beautiful. The idea came to me when Miroslav Volf mentioned how abundant the creation is. His philosopher friend wonders not why there is but why there is so much. God has created an abundant excessive creation, and there really is an excessive of good, we usually just don't see it. And so for my own good I would like to enjoy the abundance. I'm thinking about textiles and used clothing, made to be against the skin, installed in a small enclosed structure that a human could walk in.
Last night my friend TJ lent me a book from an exhibit called "A Broken Beauty". The exhibit shows mainly painting from Christian artists who paint humans, showing the brokenness of human nature as well as the beauty of what God has created. One of the articles was kind of defensive and seems to think that anyone who doesn't paint figures realistically and doesn't base their art on Thomas Aquinas as interpreted by Jacques Maritain are about the business of "disharmonious compositions" and "Late Modernism's dogged determination to overturn those traditions that healthily link the past to the present", whatever those are. But making art that resonates with the Christian view of the world as both broken and beautiful is at least worth considering, and definitely doesn't seem to be the project of most venerated artists today. My previous investigations into the theological idea of beauty led me to the conception that truth, goodness and beauty are all interconnected, so beauty can be defined as the good, or that which expresses the truth and makes the good happen in the world. Is the purpose of theology and of art to make the world a better place? That's something else I need to think about.
Dave Hickey and Peter Schjeldahl are art critics I need to find out more about.