Alan Lawson (MA Hons, PGCE) is a painter from the United Kingdom. At the age of eighteen he won the Hutchinson Art Prize and a commission from Bowmore Whisky Distilery and studied under the portrait painter Alan Sutherland. Alan decided not to pursue a formal education in art and embarked on a career in philosophy and literature. Alan continued to paint en plein air, often in extreme conditons, and combined his love of painting with his skills as a mountaineer and BASI snowboard instructor. These passions led him to Switzerland where he spent nine years teaching philosophy and painting in the mountains.

In 2008 Alan discovered the Florence Academy of Art, and with it the art education he’d always desired. Alan is currently a student and assistant drawing instructor at the FAA.

Lecture: Beauty, Teleology, and Taste

This lecture offers a brief introduction to the subject of beauty. It begins with the rejection of classical notions of beauty in the early twentieth century and the causes of this. The lecture then jumps back and forth in time in an attempt to show some of the major ethical and epistemological developments and their impacts on ideas of ‘beauty’. The conclusion, is not a definition of beauty but an attempt to frame the correct questions in approaching it.

“The answer to the question ‘What is beauty?’ is approached vicariously through another question: ‘how should we live?”

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PART I 15 min.