2005 What is the relationship of art to beauty? Beauty in art does not always follow a well marked path. To start, there is of course, the idealized beauty we are all familiar with which allows us to experience art as an intrinsic part of the message. If only most art were that simple. Superficial attractiveness cannot of course, convey inhumanity and or devastation. Pablo Picasso's paintings are no less powerful and evocative due to the absence of beauty as an essential ingredient. The use of stylized and contorted images of people and animals dramatically portrayed in stark, diagonal planes of light transmits enormous quantities of emotion and energy. Beyond the wider definition of what constitutes beauty in art, an additional difficulty that manifests itself is that the concept of beauty is highly subjective, personal and abstract. Beauty is cultural as well. African Art is just one example to consider. Looking back at the 'aesthetic soup' it would seem that there are so many precepts involved in arriving at a concrete definition of what, in fact, constitutes beauty and its affiliation to art, that no one set of parameters would ever be up to accomplishing the task. The following artists in this exhibit we believe still value the concept of beauty in art but clearly defy all of the old master rules in that the beauty to be found in these heroic and extraordinary works, is derived from the pure pleasure of the artist's imagination to suggest unlimited possibilities through intrinsically non regimented, forms.