self expression = beauty

Visual images can be beautiful, and they can be chaotic.
I sometimes wonder about how to balance these two competing things.
My perfect journal pages are beautiful in their cluttery disorder.
For me, the illustratey kind of art, the kind that just shows one basic idea presented clearly or with one statement in mind, often is not very inspiring.
I look for confusion and complexity -- something my eye wants to linger over and wonder about.
I like many layers to images so I keep looking and then seeing more and more.
Many pages in my journal are not so pretty at first glance, but for me, the more I look the more I see, so I am satisfied with what they say for me, and what they look like.
and really, our world is so full of images that are meant to sell us stuff, images of sexy, young, plasticy-perfect humans, that beauty for me has to be something other than one clear image, more than the air-brushed perfection I am told is how things "should" look.
If I am reflecting my own inner chaos, the pages in my journal will be chaotic, messy, torn and ripped, perhaps spilling off the page, even.
The book will be fat and the binding worn and broken.
The book will have been around the block a few times, like me.
Thinking things should be "perfect" and unblemished is so LAST MILLENNIUM!
Not worrying, allowing lovely chaos and visual cacaphony - this is the new way to see things.




"Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning." --Katherine Anne Porter