beauty and terror

It's hard to be both pretty and terrifying at the same time, but we try endlessly.

                                                -   necessary violence

We've been firming up the galleys for the upcoming MANSION anthology this week, and I gave a final pass over my own pieces within and stumbled upon a line that I'd forgotten about, but that made me giggle, considering a couple weeks back when I was writing my artist statement draft, I had mentioned a similar idea there-about loving the pretty and the terrible, the beautiful and the horrific.  

Once when I was giving a reading, someone told me after that my poems reminded them as a mashup of Sylvia Plath and David Lynch, and I've always held the comparison close to my heart.  Think of the visuals in something like Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, and the undercurrents of darkness.   Maybe it's latent goth girl tendencies, or being weaned on horror movies,  but I like to think of it as similar to the beautiful flower with the decay already inside. Hawthorne's Rappucini's Daughter whose kiss meant death.  Ornateness and decadence that hides the worst things.  Last summer, one of the reasons I loved HBO's Sharp Objects was it's beautiful southerness tinged with violence and rot.  The "innocent" girl who is the most horrible of all.  There are so many examples throughout pop culture. Last fall's Haunting of Hull House is a perfect example, so many stunning visuals, so much scary. 

Many people have mentioned that while my visual art tends toward the pretty, there is definitely a darkness there too. I'm not sure these tow things are always at odds, and in fact, sometimes one may lead to the other, or they are somehow dependent.  Why do we find roses so beautiful, is it because they are intrinsically appealing or is it that they are so quick to die? I've been thinking of this with a few more recent collage series--the combination of the light visuals and the dark poems of the summer house in particular. 

The best things are those which create a really pretty picture to look at  and then expose the terror. Sort of like lifting up a rug to see the teeming earth crawling with insects beneath it. 

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