Inverted Beauty

My friend Shona told me once about how at a Latin dance club the sexual politics strangely inverted. The old men were the phenomenal dancers, and what is rarely the case transpired. All the young beautiful women badly wanted to be picked as dance partner to lecherous old men, and nobody wanted to go with the young handsome studs.

In working on Super Secret Project 2, I have found this general principal to be affirmed, and thus deem it safe to talk about. Beauty is inverted when it comes to drawing in simple lines. Why? The central tenants of 'beauty' what is appealing to the eye, is symmetry and smoothness. Trying to capture this by carving lines into a page with a pencil is very difficult, it requires a lot of restraint.

One of the easiest ways to work on yur drawing for example is the contour technique. You literally feel an object with your eyes, press the tip of your pencil to the page and without looking at your work, imagine your pencil actually running on the contours of the object.

So maybe you can, maybe you can't, imagine running that along a pretty girls nose. Seems easy right? but then you look down and that pretty girl looks 80 years older than whatever reference you are working off. The more details you add to ascertain the shape the worse it looks.

Relatably, I was doing some portraits of some friends, and I found the most attractive of my friends, a young man with nary a blemish to speak of, was the hardest to capture in a picture, I wouldn't call the guy unexpressive or lacking in personality, but drawing wise, the best thing he had going for him was an above average sized nose. Attractiveness alas is paradoxically distinctiveness.

Yet drawing someone with a very lined face, with big ass lips and a broken nose, is an absolute pleasure. Drawing someone hungover, or in anguish, or scared, or with missing teeth, or lined with incredible age. These, these are what I love to draw, love to capture. This is beauty when it comes to drawing.

These are the people now that when I see them in the street thing, 'what a picture they would make' those that cry out for a photograph, they are petite, diminutive, plain, boring.

It's all topsy turvy. Art demands character, and I never really realised it before, but so much of what society puts up on a pedestal as beautiful, is merely an absence of offense. There is no character, no expression, no story to read.

It's the celebration of 'the virgin' the girl with no life experience, no sexual encounters, no personality to resist what? what the fuck does that say about society? I've never slept with a virgin, and I hope never to have the mispleasure. I know somebody has to, but I'm thankful it isn't me.

Success does not consist of avoiding failure, in the same way I now believe beauty is not the absence of imperfections. Beauty is attitude, and it is experience. It's actually being able to wear your face and have it say something.