Flashes from the Dark: April 2011

Sunday, April 10, 2011

The difference in time

As seasons change so does our view of our surroundings. Winter brings on a lack of color and separates us from nature, we stay warm in our homes. Summer brings upon color and a closeness with nature, we bbq and camp. But it is all the same just a matter of perception.

Basis

This blog was designed to explore the hidden side of humanity through art. As the study of and creative preoccupation with beauty, art is something I've long struggled with. I thought it fundamentally if not blatantly vain and therefore devoid of any substantive value. Indeed, like vanity in general, I regarded it as positively dangerous. At the same time, I've always found myself drawn to art with the bright eyes and excitement of a much better person. This fostered quite a tension as I felt intellectually and morally compelled to reject art while being viscerally and intuitively inclined to embrace it.

It was only recently that I succeeded in balancing this equation, in finding a happy medium where dichotomy becomes duality. Beauty, I've come to conclude, is only superficially vain (this may well constitute a whimsical type of recursion, but I believe it the truth nonetheless), holding a well of fantastic meaning just below its surface. Beauty, I now believe, is a form of communication.

This is easiest to see in art, where the beauty is the deliberate expression of the artist. Inevitably there will be a message communicated through its beauty and a meaning that underlies it. This can be more difficult to see in natural beauty, but without invoking a creator and his/her teleological message I will defend my position by referring to the response natural beauty evokes in its viewer. It is a sort of cosmological introspection when deep and inflective emotions are aroused in the self-assembled cells that previously embodied distant nebulae. These emotions are of course our reaction to natural beauty and give voice to the thoughts of the subconscious. In doing so, beauty becomes communication - flashes of meaning (perhaps personal, perhaps universal, perhaps intrinsic and transcendental, and perhaps a superimposed invention) from the vast darkness of existence.

In this sense, this blog is devoted to revealing the under-received and under-realized communications floating all around us. It is a tribute of sorts to the unseen museum next-door. I hope to post here the works of myself and my friends. Our most meaningful expressions of self that nobody knows.

Flashes from the Dark

Sunday, April 10, 2011

The difference in time

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