Face Your Fears

I'm an artist. I've been an artist ever since I was a little girl. I used to draw my own comic books and staple them together, I used to make videos with the few friends I had, actual ongoing plot based videos, and a whole lot more. I'm not averse to art, I absolutely love art and I think it's crucial in our world, especially in todays world which is filled with nothing but ugliness, we need that beauty and that simplicity. But then...every once in a while...there's a piece that's created that's utterly terrifying and baffling. Take, for example, this mask which I've named The Lovely Terror. This appears to be a homemade craft made on, what looks like, an old paper plate. Those rough kind your grandparents would generally have around the house. I could be totally wrong, especially seeing as I only have this singular image of said mask to go off of, but that's just my guess. The fact that there's an entire smile but only a small slit in the m...

There's, on the surface (and, I suppose, underneath too) not really much to say about this mask in terms of it's design and it's spooky factor. It's not really bad, it's not really amazing, it's not really much of anything, but there is one thing I want to discuss and that's something I sort of touched on in my Grandpa Jones post, which is the concept of aging. For some reason, for as long as I can remember, there's been one particular type of Halloween mask that has been around, and that is the old person mask. Sometimes it's more grotesque, other times it's not really all that interesting, and sometimes, like here, it's sort of disheveled but still rather tame. And this doesn't stop at just masks, this goes all the way to the film industry where they age people using makeup to make them look older. This just...it sort of rubs me the wrong way. We live in a culture of youth. Everything always has to be new, or else it isn't ne...