Enemy of Entropy
Archive for Art
September 2010 NaBloPoMo Theme: Art
I received the NaBloPoMo newsletter today and learned that this month’s theme is Art. On the one hand, I thought, “I have nothing to say! I’m not an artist. Blah.”
On the other hand, I’m coming to realize that I must have order in my life or I start dying, bit by bit. “Enemy of Entropy” isn’t just a fanciful blog title. Disorder is painful to me. Dull colors, harsh lighting, loud sounds, poor ventilation, and pervasive odors can drag anyone down, but they make me ill very rapidly.
If you find me surrounded by chaos you can be sure that either I haven’t been in that space long enough to impose order, or that something is very, very wrong.
I’m healthiest and happiest when I’m when I find ways to increase the amount of harmony and beauty around me. There is beauty in order, and art, for me, involves order — some kind of order, even if it isn’t always obvious.
I’m never going to be an Artist in any classical sense of the word. I have, however, established peaceful, joyful spaces for my family and friends to live in and visit. I put together fabric and fibers to create unique works of embroidery. When I sing, alone or with others, the result is no less beautiful for its ephemerality.
I’ll be trying to explore my own kind of art this month through blogging, my identity as an artist. And I’ll be working on getting back to blogging regularly, obviously. This is a new sort of blog post for me, more introspective. We’ll see how that goes.
Pretty picture, meme, etc.
Sam started a meme!
What? Huh?
There was something specific I was going to post. I know it. I remember thinking, “Oh, yeah, I want to blog about that!” But I didn’t do it immediately and now, of course, it’s gone, gone, gone. Blah.
So, instead, you get a little hodge-podge update of books and pictures. Read on…
Sunrise? Sunset?
I don’t know which. But it’s lovely!
TotD: Freya Stark on Beauty
From Perseus in the Wind by Freya Stark:
If loveliness is so engaged, as I believe, in the skein of our universe, it is sad that it should be little cared for in our schools. The whole of the industrial world proclaims its unimportance, and millions and millions of people spend their lives looking almost exclusively at ugly things. This surely will pass. What is more insidiously dangerous at the moment is a timid heresy which believes that the ignorant can be trained to beauty by the second-rate. The fallacy of our age maintains it better to do things badly than not at all. As a matter of fact there is very little harm in doing nothing: to do things badly is an active getting in the way of the few necessary people who might do good. To adapt beauty to “the man in the street” is to use the bed of Procrustes with a vengeance and to mutilate divinity: it is better to remember that the man in the street himself was made in the likeness of God. To him beauty is simple and easy, a natural hunger which all can assimilate in elementary or complicated form, provided they are not cluttered up with mediocrity already. Mediocrity will never lead to beauty: the two roads are not even parallel; they are divergent.
