Words + Pictures re: Beautiful Things
Toucan's Holiday Open House is this Saturday, November 30
Since Allison and I assumed ownership of the Toucan business and brand some 18 years ago, it has coexisted with the slogan: “Beautiful Things.” This tagline essentially wrote itself, as it emerged fully formed from this essence: our belief when we bought Toucan that our mission should be one dedicated to creating, curating, and providing a space for beautiful things in our hometown of Billings, a place that, admittedly, must work a little bit harder—or perhaps for whom its residents, its true believers, must willingly suspend their disbelief—than a lot of other places in Montana to earn its beautiful bona fides—oil refineries on the river, baked-to-brown landscapes, so much broken glass (although in this regard, apparently, a hero rises among us).
I don’t know if people actually say “a diamond is forever” or “when you care enough to send the very best” or “you deserve a break today” in the context of diamonds and greeting cards and fast food, but when we realized people were saying our slogan, naïve to it and unprompted: “You have such beautiful things,” we thought we just might be onto something.
HOLIDAY OPEN HOUSE
Saturday, November 30, 10:30 am – 4 pm
Toucan will, in fact, be celebrating all of these beautiful things with our annual Holiday Open House on Saturday, November 30 from 10:30 am to 4 pm. We weren't able to mount such an event last year due to our efforts at reinvigorating and moving Toucan to a new location, so we hope you will join us this year at that new location at 1002 2nd Ave N. We'll have some hot beverages and snacks and all the unique artisan-made products perfect for those looking for a unique holiday gift!
And as special recognition of our long association with Bozeman artist Sarah Angst, we will have Sarah's work on sale: 25% off all originals, all giclee prints on paper and wood panel, and all tile jewelry. We have Sarah's Holiday Card packs, too, in addition to her other greeting cards and stickers.
Please come join us on Saturday, November 30 from 10:30 am to 4 pm. It's also Small Business Saturday, which Toucan has participated in celebrating since its inception in 2010. Kick off the holiday season and support our small, locally-owned business.
#ShopSmall
For those who might want to continue with this correspondence, let’s proceed to essay along with respect to beautiful things, or beauty, in particular.
I think I’ve mentioned that I’m working on something about this very quality. I thought I was working on something about progress—human progress—but now I think it might be about beauty, the idea of beauty as more essential than progress to ease what existential psychotherapist Irvin Yalom terms existence pain. And when I say I’m working on something, I mean some kind of body of work, thought rendered in words and pictures and contained in sequential frames. That could describe a movie (or tv show, as it is when people speak and pictures move, and when we now don’t quite know what to call anything anymore, as Allison and I experience virtually everything we consume in this regard via a tiny black box with an apple, an Apple, etched into it, streaming now the coin of the moving picture realm) but maybe it’s a book of some kind, still frames, words and pictures contained between covers, and whereby this Substack may act, in part (or, to be honest, maybe this part is in fact the whole thing, the end never really known until it rises up and swallows us whole) as a kind of repository of ideas and experiments, a sort of online commonplace book to contain the digital inklings of a developing hypothesis of how humans survive emotionally and intellectually.
And when I write of beauty, I mean humans creating beauty or interpreting beauty via some medium of making in the world, as opposed to that beauty which exists as a byproduct of nature. This is what Toucan, in its physical, real-world form (as opposed to this, its virtual, rhetorical form), is about, after all, such that Toucan, in its physical, real-world form, is in and of itself a frame (although certainly this, its virtual, rhetorical form, is also a frame), a construct to give context to and make more understandable the beauty that it contains. (That this Toucan, a frame, would also provide the framing of artwork as a service within it, frames within a frame, might only mean that the conceptual framework of framing might extend indefinitely, our every contained notion framed in an infinite line of reason and experience, a frame within a frame within a frame within a frame within...well, you get the idea.)
In fact, this quality we call beauty, it might not even exist without a frame, our very howling human condition tamed by the structure we create to reduce a universe to bite-size morsels of meaning. Without context nothing means anything and everything means nothing.
Once framed, whatever it is, however it is, its beauty is subjective of course, that quality realized only in the eye of the beholder, as we’ve always heard, but there is, in fact, a normal curve with certain key concepts that help to understand aesthetic experiences (aesthetic just a fancy word for that which deals with beauty and taste). Which is to say that there are things that more people than not understand to be beautiful. This then becomes social, however, rather than personal, the consensus of the domain, although it’s never not personal, since the beholder’s eye is only ever yours. Of course, art—Art—in many ways abandoned beauty, however it is beheld, beginning in the Romantic age and culminating in the Modern era when Art was largely institutionalized and the rhetorical practice of those institutions was better suited to arguing about concepts and ideas than nurturing the technical skills required to produce, well, beautiful things. The Artist’s Statement took its place beside the art itself in order to explain and justify something that at one time the beholders were trusted to understand on their own.
Which leads me to wonder—when I find myself looking at art steeped in, often drowning in, creative thought rather than bespoke beauty, a framed idea, conceptual pyrotechnics and manufactured myth, rather than simply the well-practiced hand at making a photograph or painting a painting—are there two arts? One is the communication of a concept, the other a rendering of something meant to please the senses. One is the art of the institution, the other, the art of the people. One belongs to Art, the other is simply, well, beautiful?
Of course, these kinds of questions are precisely of the kind that puts this particular Toucan, in its virtual and rhetorical form, squarely in the realm of the academic, the institutional, the pretentious, but, again, it turns out there are two Toucans, so I will happily have it both ways and wallow here in the rhetorical, while at the same time encourage you to come to the physical, at 1002 2nd Avenue North in Billings, for our Holiday Open House, so you can see some beautiful things in person, no explanation necessary.
To finish, some words from the writer, poet, and visual artist, Kahlil Gibran, who perhaps captures something in the idea of beauty more true than anything I can conjure with my own simple questions: “Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror. But you are eternity and you are the mirror.”