Happy Birthday, Mom!

My mom is a gardener extraordinaire. She taught me a love of beauty. And patience. And humility. There are other things she's still working on. She had her work cut out for her when she had me, but she manages beautifully. Happy birthday, Mom!

The Beautiful and The Ugly

Today's quote is from Oscar Wilde. "No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly."

Flawed Beauty

Tonight was my last art photography class where we revealed our final assignment; the summation of our experience of the class. If you've seen the Louis Malle film Vanya on 42nd Street, it was much like the final scene, (if you haven't seen it, rent it now!), where all the actors at the end of rehearsal come to realize they've had a profound experience and they depart, one by one, as the characters they depicted reluctantly slip from their faces and bodies. There is something special that happens when a diverse group of strangers get together, share ideas, learn, and come to some of the same conclusions of what constitutes beauty. The shot I've posted is a picture that, a year ago, I would have deleted immediately, failing to see anything beautiful in it. My friend, Kathie, said the same thing about her cover image on the Blurb book she created. Stunning, isn't it?

The trick now? To carry these ideas forward.

Beauty

I remember, as a first year art student, taking a break from my oil painting class to have a cup of coffee with my advisor. Drinking bad coffee from styrofoam cups in a warehouse that smelled of turpentine and linseed oil, he asked me, "Do you want to make 'beautiful' paintings all your life?" I blinked, and being young and naive, answered, "Well, yes ..." I could see nothing wrong with wanting to bring beauty into people's lives, even if my idea of beauty needed stretching a bit. I knew that the painting I'd seen that morning with a Special K logo and a hanger wasn't beautiful, and I knew that I wasn't destined to make art from household goods and breakfast cereals to emphasize the banality of contemporary life. Rather, if I were to make art from household goods and breakfast cereals, I wouldn't use them to point out how pathetic people's lives were, a category of art that was already being well populated at the time.

My ideas of beauty are quite changed now; some of the most ordinary things strike me with the memories they conjure, their colors and textures and lines. As Beethoven once said, "Yes, I know it's ugly, but is it beautiful?" I can't define beauty, but I know that it changes the lives of people that it touches.

How would you define beauty?

Be the Driver of Your Life

I was sitting in class tonight. I am one of two adult, non-traditional students in a class of 24 students. We two older students are generally the only ones who participate in the question/answer model of your average modern classroom. The other students are either text-messaging their friends or staring straight ahead. The professor is clearly frustrated at this lack of responsiveness, but seems a little used to it.

I restrain myself from standing up and saying, "YOU ARE THE DRIVER OF this vehicle called YOUR LIFE."

This is perhaps one of the blessings of getting older, not being afraid to actually answer a professor's question, even if you answer wrong -- and not caring what those around you think if you do get the answer wrong.

That I believe myself the driver of my life goes further than the classroom. Everything in life, even the sweetest friendships, take effort and energy, and the rewards generally equal the effort.

There are many things that are beyond my control; the weather, the clock, traffic, the economy, the good or bad opinion of others (at least this last one I have a small influence over). I realize that bad things sometimes unaccountably happen to good people, but I am not a fatalist. I think it was Emily Dickenson (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) who said, "If you seek beauty, you will find it." I might append her quote with, "And if you seek nothing, you will find it."