Eclectic Waters

Archive for the ‘Art’ Category

He cuts his ear for the same reason he paints his paintings. Watching himself in the mirror, he is meticulously aware of the flick of his wrist. It is the same flick that is captured in his Starry Night painting. Each star, each color highlighted by the distinct pattern of the brush he choose. Each brushstroke visible.

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I’ve used painting as a metaphor to begin many boring research papers, most of which I wrote in college. The papers were dumb. Simple. I’ve thrown all but a couple of them away. The few I have left I hope to twist into poetry or art later in life; they have potential. I keep papers for the ideas or information they offer; most facts bore me.

Most facts have been written about numerous times. You can look them up in a dictionary, encyclopedia, or now, on the web. But they all taste the same. Like unsalted meat or unsweetened porridge. Gross. So I avoid facts just as I avoid the newspaper. It is too dry, to distant from true art and true stories. Great stories, to be captured most truly, must be elaborated and embellished. It is not important that the facts are true, but that the texture of the story, the emotions and colors, are true. I want to capture, on paper, the stories of the people I interview, in their own words, because that is where truth (with a small t) and beauty is found.

It is the type of storytelling and story-capturing I aspire to do. I don’t want to tell you the facts, I don’t want to tell you exactly what happened. . How boring. But I will tell you how it tasted, what I saw, what I felt, and what I heard. And if you’re lucky I might actually tell you what it smelled like. But mostly I live through my ears, which is why I am constantly hunting for people to tell me their stories.

I live in the words they tell me; I play in halls their words build. Like a child playing hide and go seek, I run, peeking from behind their spoken sentences.

Stories are how I make sense of my life; my life is a story; we are all caught in a story. Yours. Mine. Ours. Stories have no boundaries. They are free, overlapping and they change as I hold them up to different colored light.

When I have not read good book for a long time, or met a stranger, whose words I can use to fill the shelves of my mind, I feel empty. Stagnant. Bored. But when I get lost in that book or meet that person, the ones whose stories seem to have been destined for my ears, my gift of writing, I come alive. I see the beauty beneath life, beneath their words, and I am caught in the world of my mind: writing…

Seeking to build sentences that are both strong and elegant, I cannot stop.

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He cuts his ear for the same reason he paints his paintings. He is meticulously aware of the flick of his wrist. Standing in the museum it is that detail: the meticulous nature of each brush stroke. I can almost picture the brush Vincent used to create those very strokes, but my mind, the pen, cannot capture the face of Vincent as he painted.

Looking at his paintings, I see a man tormented and freed by the same gift. It allowed his mind release. The color and brilliance caught in the skin of his skull finally expressed, on blank canvas. That gift was both his release and his eventual downfall. He was caught with that gift in the abyss of depression and aloneness most brilliant artists never escape, except in death. Did he know God? The same angst and depression that created the colorful pictures of brilliance also created the red blood that poured from his self-mutilated ear.

But even in that pain, Vincent saw beauty. Red. A stream touching his cheek, gathering on the floor. It was a simple price to pay. Pain.

It was the price of beauty, of art, of brilliance.

Eventually the price would become too great, but until then, he painted.