Or do we?

Can we alter our perceptions of what's beautiful? Should we?

Is it as Confucius said, that everything has beauty but not everyone sees it?

Artist often aim to provoke their viewers, and "Imperfect Beauty," opening tomorrow night at the downtown Space 237 Gallery, does just that with the work of three Illinois artists. All returned to college in their 30s and 40s to study art and now teach college-level art in the Greater Chicago area.

Toledo is the fifth venue for this exhibit, which has been shown in Illinois and most recently at the Evansville Museum in Indiana.

Their combined figurative paintings and prints focus on women and explore maturity, body image, and coping with age and infirmity.

"Beauty is what's taught in our culture. Children are beautiful, teenagers are beautiful. At what age do you stop being beautiful?" said Grall, in Toledo last week to hang her work.

Set against gentle backdrops with soft colors, her silver-haired subjects seem contented. And lovely.

Brushing acrylics on a 6-foot-by10-foot canvas, Grall painted a robed woman combing her coif before three mirrors, none of which reflect. However, the accompanying text -- a definition of a princess from a fairy tale -- is backward, and best read with a mirror.

Another lush canvas, 6 feet by 15 feet, portrays Grall's Cuban-American mother at one end, the smoke from her cigarette morphing into cirrus clouds. Her open blouse reveals the chest scar from smoking-related heart surgery. Emerging from the clouds are young, dark-haired women dressed in svelte fashions of the 1940s: the goddesses her mother would have looked to as a teen and young adult.

Davida (named after an uncle) Schulman throws a bring-it-on dare to viewers and is willing to put her body on the line. She's often her subject; a large, middle-aged matron, sometimes nude, and looking squarely at the viewer. Nude females in paintings were rarely portrayed looking straight out, she noted. "That's one of the devices to take women's power away. And it allows for a voyeuristic element."

Schulman incorporates mirrors, paint brushes, references to famous paintings, and dolls ("they don't talk back; there's no thinking for themselves," she said). And, they aren't fat.

"Fat people are derided on TV, portrayed as sick, depressed, slovenly, as not functioning well, " she said. "I was a heavy kid and really got derided by it. I couldn't be something I'm not --it's just not written on my DNA. I'm going to present myself as it is and if people don't like it, tough."

In one fleshy portrait, she's flanked on the vertical left with postcard-sized paintings of women by men: Cezanne, Gauguin, Picas- so, and de Kooning, and on the right by small paintings of women by women, including Gentileschi, O'Keeffe, Kahlo, and Schulman herself. Her question: "Where am I in art history? Women got forgotten."

Sigrid Wonsil's former career as a nurse bleeds onto her pictures of brave souls coping with disability and impending death.

Sweetly poignant is Comfort Measures, a large, black-and-white print of an old woman sleeping in a hospital bed, oxygen tubes in her nostrils. She cradles a sleeping baby, pacifier in mouth. The title refers to the small things nurses do for patients--fluffing a pillow, providing pain relief--that don't cure their condition but ease their distress.

In a large canvas, a man drives a scooter, his leg, infected for years, wrapped from toe to knee.

There's a small etching of her mother, little more than a shadowy head sunk into a pillow. Looming above her is a bar from which a chain and equipment hang.

"I have paid a lot more attention to the equipment than the patient," said Wonsil. And that's what nurses do when they don't get feedback "I could see this as both a nurse and from the artist's perspective; she's [my mother] losing her personhood."

A free, public reception for "Imperfect Beauty" is tomorrow, 7 to 9 p.m. at Space 237, 237 North Michigan St. The show continues to Feb. 24. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Friday, noon to 4 p.m. Saturday, and by appointment. Information: 419-255-5117 and www.space237.com.