expbeauty

this painting is about beauty, and our attitudes towards what we feel is/are beautiful. the flower (a rose, actually) represents something "beautiful", rather something that is supposed to be beautiful. the black syrup oozing from beneath it is a subtle indication that perhaps this flower is poinsonous.

the girl in the painting i tried to make look silvery and smooth, like mercury. something that cant feel, yet that is so magnetic. something that can shine so many different ways you're never really sure quite what (or in this case, who) you're looking at - never quite sure whether it's alive or not.

this girl represents the girl inside of me. shes chained to this flower - this beautiful thing, and yet she screams and cries as though she needs to escape it. the beautiful thing in in my life at that point was, in fact, love. love is seen as this tremedous beautiful force. but for this girl inside its hurtful, it weighs her down. maybe then, i think , it was not truly love.

the flower is also there to represent something that we know we feel is beautiful, but we only think of it at that exact second, in that same state, with petals unfolding and sweeping like gracefully like the arms of a ballernia in some great celestial ballet. what we do not think about is what happens to this flower after that point in time. it starts to grey, to whither, and then what do we do with it? we throw it away. it decays. it dies. in my case, there was a love, and yes, it was truly beautiful - while it was alive. but then it dies, and in the end this girl (me) ends up chained to a decrepit, dead shell. the shell of something i once thought beautiful.

then again, maybe this girl is crying because at that point, this love was alive and indeed beautiful. maybe she is crying because she knows how it will end.

paintings like these take on new meanings for me every time i delve into them. sometimes its painful and sometimes its bliss, but whatever the emotion i continually appreciate it because i know at least that i have not separated from myself so completely that i cannot feel.