The good, the bad, and the ugly

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about beauty and ugliness. Historically, I have consistently struggled with wanting all my art to look “beautiful”: to have every detail just so, all elements in balance, a harmonious color palette, and so on. When I took my first art class, at Oxbow, I felt greatly frustrated that I could not represent the beauty of the trees and water and rocks around me at the art colony.

As the years passed, and I returned to school to study graphic design, I envied the Asian students, who all seemed to have an effortlessly exquisite visual esthetic.

This could be the reason I shied away from drawing in my work, and gravitated to photography of buildings and architectural elements, things with hard edges easy to represent. (Or maybe it goes back to my childhood, where to the consternation of my mother, I played with Legos and blocks, not dolls!)

As I was looking through slides of my early work, I came across this piece, a painting I did to express my anger at someone I was enthralled with. It was the first time I intentionally let go of seeking something “beautiful,” opting instead to channel the anger into a raw, rough representation of my feelings. The colors are weird, the composition probably amateurish, but boy did it feel good!

Ironically, during the years I fixated on beauty in my work, I allowed myself to absorb a great deal of ugliness in other parts of my life: I devoured novels about serial killers, watched shows like Criminal Minds, read about the concentration camps, absorbing details of enormous emotional ugliness and evil.

But a few years ago, I swore off those kinds of materials. I no longer want to go to those places even if just in my mind. At the same time, I have become much more forgiving of myself for not drawing perfectly or having everything just so.

Well, some of the time, anyway!