Having taken up drawing again, after a long hiatus of many years, and searching for the next picture to make a drawing of, I have noticed that there are a lot of things I DON'T want to take on as subjects d'arte. Most people are pretty ordinary. Their faces are not striking, memorable, defined, or different. So from an art perspective not that interesting. Celebrity portraits are a dime a dozen, and not only has it been done, it has been done many, many times before. So I'm looking around at this and that, seeing if anything catches my eye, and I notice something.
Kris Atomic- Unsplash.com
Most of the art we see, the paintings, the photographs, the drawings, the logos, the (staged) magazine covers, the good-looking actors in the movies, and especially the supermodels, are caricatures, what we want to see as the ideal man or woman. Since their faces and body types seem to fit the idea of the perfect human form closer than the body you inhabit or the face you were born with, they get the roles and you don't (unless you're a character actor, of course).
So we're always presented, everywhere we look, with stylized versions of the human form and hardly ever with the baseline human form. Why is that? I think it is because we all want to embody the ideal form and represenatives of it are role-modeling that possibility for us, which points to a basic human limitation. We- most of us- cannot actually be those ideal forms, no mattter how much we diet, work out, put on makeup, cut our hair, or adorn our forms with the latest fashions. So we're stuck. Boo-hoo.
Kris Atomic- Unsplash.com
But what ARE we, really? We're that which is behind all forms, for the forms we inhabit don't last. They might peak for awhile in our twenties, but, well, you know. Age happens, followed by, well, you know.....
Taking that further, what/where/who IS that spark that animates these forms, that which is called 'I' when in form, and 'soul' when 'I' is not contained? Correct! It's form-LESS! Like water, maybe, it simply takes the shape of whatever container you want to place it in, but it is not the container and never will be. That is amazing, that is what we truly are, and that is also kind of freaky if you think about it but.... this has always been the case, hasn't it? We're just wearing these illusory forms for awhile.