This Place Could be Beautiful, Right?

The first person to lay eyes on my art was an old friend, someone I’ve known since high school.  The images I shared with her were early iterations of my still life work — gore, dead animal organs, rubbish — conceptually similar to what I do these days but with a lot more rough edges.  She poured over the pictures for a time and I studied her face and waited for a reaction.  

“You know what’s interesting?”

I waited.

“Anything can be beautiful if you light it well.”

This wasn’t an interpretation that had occurred to me.  It struck me as a cogent reading of the work and, quite frankly, this one sentence probably would have been better than most of the artist’s statements I’ve written.  But it wasn’t what I had intended to convey.  I stayed away from this line of thinking for a while although, in many ways, it has only become more relevant as this project has evolved.  

I was reminded of that conversation with my friend recently when I stumbled across Maggie Smith’s poem, Good Bones.  The piece originally went viral on social media not long after a single gunman killed 49 people and wounded 53 more inside Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando.  Since then the poem has become one of those things that people pass around in the wake of tragedy; a lament about the state of the world and a yearning for something better.  It’s a piece that initially seemed rather too sentimental for my tastes although now, as I reread it, I’m not so sure if those final lines express hope, or resignation.  

The realtor’s job, after all, is to make the sale.

Presumably she’d chirp on about “good bones” even if the foundation’s rotten and the roof could fall at any minute and raccoons have nested in the walls.

My intentions with this image cleave rather closely to the sentiment of Smith’s poem, and to my old friend’s belief that any subject can be rendered beautiful.  The image is composed almost entirely of trash — dead flowers, a banana peel, a fistful of old pie crusts, a bone picked clean of flesh.  I wanted to make something visually appealing out of these scraps of garbage, while at the same time being honest about the subject at hand.  Of course the choice of props speaks to the death-haunted themes of the piece, but I was also after something a bit deeper as well, encoded in the geometry of the arrangement.  The placement of the bone here is precarious and unstable; there’s a sense that this will not last forever.

That afternoon my old friend and I talked for hours.  She had recently lost her mother and she spoke of the sickness, of the days spent in hospital, CT scans and MRIs and pathology slides.  She saw a kind of strange beauty in those medical images, in the texture of flesh, in the fractal web of veins, the way that every object, when viewed at sufficient magnification, becomes abstract and unfamiliar.

We finished our tea, switched to drinking beer.

Her children played outside.

And the fading daylight, broken through the tree branches, threw illusive shimmering patterns on her kitchen wall.

It was beautiful to look at while it lasted.