New and Used

The Beauty of Mess

I want to see your makeup mess. I want the textures you’ve devoured and the floating pigment fairies sparkling through the sunbeam from a powder poof. I want to see what shape your lips make when imprinted into the satin bullet by habit. I want to see which brushes you’ve washed a hundred times, and the center slope of Tuscan sunset blush almost touching tin. Scattered along the table tiles run green smears from a rushed morning, a cap bound in black gaffer tape so it can live to line another day. Creamy strokes on a bronze palette next to fingerprints.

There’s intimacy in a mess. A closeness to the guts of the muse and their person. There’s curiosity, discovery, choices, obsessions. There’s repetition in the favorites, there’s a telling of tendencies … is there a love for terra cotta or a pattern of pink? A rainbow of brown or forgetting of blue?

Inside this world of clean, shiny, new ……. I begin to find too much loneliness in the images. An absence of human experience leaves so much museum mindset to these treasures meant to be used. So precious we can’t touch them. Devoid of a use case scenario, the hunger for acquisition rests in a sanitized fantasy that stands still in time. Captured in the taboo of getting dirty, we forget what grows us.

Indeed there is negative space which serves - a clean canvas, an empty table, the light and the shadow, the light in the cracks - there is value to restraint in a creative pursuit or design of any kind. A space which allows the articulated to give good presence. To offer clarity. Space in the mind for ideas. Air in the room. A blank page with a mere sketch. A boundary without which we may fall into utter chaos - a place beyond mess. Beyond well-loved or lived-in.

I want to see patina, pan, a vanity in process. I want to feel that spark of inspiration from seeing possibility from tools as much as canvas, from old even more than new, and share in the mutual reverie of in-use.

-mo