My long lost love. I’ve left these keys abandoned for some time as I’ve been thoroughly courted and engaged by the colorful arts. However, you’ve been calling to me the last few days. For whatever reason I’ve been resisting. When my underlying emotions get too stormy though and anxiety has me questioning sanity, then I know. I know it is time for a visit. I have to speak even if there is nothing to say. I have to speak.
Some thought that has been persistent that I felt worthy of discussion was what makes something realistic. What is it in art that makes something beautiful? When painting or drawing the very things that make it come to life are all of the details. The shading and subtle hues. All the tiny details are what catches your breath. Writing is very much the same. In pretty much every English class i took in both high school and college they expressed the significance of the use of adjectives and descriptive words. It can feel corny at times to describe someones physical attributes in words when you are simply trying to tell your story. However, it is these details, these tiny strokes of adjectives and adverbs between the verbs and nouns that capture our imagination.
If you were to paint a pool and you painted it all one color of blue, how flat and boring it would be. It is all the shades of colors, refracted light and shadows, and reflections that create its depth. Just as you can train your eye to see these nuances and apply them to paper, I suppose it is with practice that you can do the same with words. The greatest writers and poets lapping on words linguistically to pages like oil to canvas.
On this same note, it is the these nuances of people which makes them beautiful. I suppose that is one reason why I favor women more than men. The very nature of women, packaged with so much mystery, so much depth, and intelligence. Complicated but beautifully so. Strange that it is the little things of others that often drive us crazy. However, it is those very little things that paint that person. Like the shadows and colors captured in oil paintings, it is only through the defects and flaws that you can accurately capture someone for who they are. Would you tell the ocean how much prettier she would be were she without the variations in color? How dull we would paint people to please the irritable beast that lies under each of our skins.
Something within us, our selfishness perhaps, self-centeredness, our ego, that causes us to tear at the flesh of flaws in the character of the imperfectly perfect souls who walk among us. As though we live without these flaws within ourselves. We are teeming with them. The flaws make up the very fabric of our being. We were not born to fear flaws. Perhaps from our red letter grades in our systematic schooling. Or the the materialistic ads depicting beauty in unascertainable forms. Like a splinter these foreign messages embed themselves under our skin. It is through nature, where we are free from judgement, which helps nullify and silence the pain. Pain that prevents us from feeling whole both internally and externally with ourselves and our fellows.
Yet we destroy the nature. The medicine we all need, we destroy. Unaware. Allured by greater highs, not peace.
Shaynanigans 