Something has moved me so brilliantly these last few days that I just had to write and share it- even imperfectly.
I have realised I am getting increasingly frustrated with the notion of “beauty” and the standards of beauty that are constantly pushed onto us.
I spend my life as an artist looking at people. I look at them as shapes, as marks on a page, as flicks of hair, and roundness of noses. I notice the softness in their cheeks, the deep lines carved into their brow.
The more I look at people, the less beautiful they become, even pretty faces, broken down as pen to paper lose the enigma they might carry for the average person. I am never delighted in someone’s hotness, nor bothered by their apparent ugliness. The only things I see now as an artist are the lives that talk themselves into the open on the skin. The pain that is carried in the heavy shoulder. The shame the body holds about itself.
The only beauty that means anything to me is that of the reality of the person. Not a perfect smile, but the unevenness of the lips. Not the symmetrical face, but the aged marks of someone who has held it together for half a century. I don’t car about your perfect teeth, or flawlessly smooth skin, show me the real you that even you are afraid of. Because that is what I will love, and that is what my pen will cherish.
This is the plight of the artist- we can see intimately deeper than the fluff and falsity of social media, beauty itself isn’t repelling, but i think i am not the only one that feels a deep aversion to the fake.
We can sense the ingenuiness of an AI image, and we can feel it instinctively in a performative post. Yet sometimes we choose not to register it.
Recently, I asked an acquaintance of mine whether they ever got bored with seeing perfectly beautiful curated, filtered, altered posts on their feed. And they said no, with glee.
I tried as best I could to explain my boredom,
They could not understand. Why wouldn’t I want to see “beautiful” men and women, why wouldn’t I feel excited by their sexy poses and handsome faces? But of course, I still find them appealing. But at the same time I also find the endless perfection so… boring.
This is a hard feeling to explain, but perhaps other artists will understand. And it’s a feeling that with age and experience gets more and more intense.
The frustration of the curated world online is affecting me deeply. I constantly want to retreat, and see the human in real life, imperfect and glorious.
So just like the flaws on the skin or the people I draw, I am writing this to you without edit. I am wanting to live my life as immediately as my eyes will allow and as free as my heart can bear. I’m not a romanticist, perhaps not even a realist. Perhaps just someone who doesn’t want real life to evaporate at the hands of filters and lies.