Louis Kavouras

A trip to the National Gallery and some words by Louis

What is beauty?

Is it the thing we spend a lifetime pursuing,
only to discover it has been walking quietly beside us all along?

Or is it something we already are,
but only recognize in the instant it begins to disappear?

Perhaps beauty refuses to be possessed.
It arrives,
lingers just long enough to awaken us,
then slips away before we can give it a name.

Plato searched for it in the language of forms.
Socrates questioned it until questions themselves became beautiful.
Artists have chased it with pigment.
Musicians with silence.
Dancers with breath.
Poets with impossible words.

We build museums
to house our longing.
We raise monuments
to moments we fear forgetting.
We fill our phones with photographs—
small attempts to persuade time
to stand still and see it.

And still,
beauty keeps moving.

I let the pencil dance across the page,
not to capture beauty,
but to wander where it has quietly passed,
hoping the graphite might discover
the faint footprints
left by wonder.

Maybe beauty was never meant to be held.

Maybe it is the invisible choreography
between seeing and being.

A brief conversation
between the world
and an awakened heart.

And perhaps the question was always the answer.

For the moment we ask,
“What is beauty?”

we have already begun
to see it. -LAK. (Writing inspired by the upcoming play, THE POWER OF THE PEN(cil) @unlvdance @cfacolab @nationalgallery #beauty #art @neaarts