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 middle is also slightly unnerving in a "serial killer" sort of way, while the fact that there's a nose made in whatever this material is is also really strange and out of place. The eyes and eyebrows are strange, but they're not unusual in the sense of what they are and how they're placed. Again, kinda weird seeing just a small hole in the center of the eyes, instead of the entire eye space cleared out, but whatever.
But you know what TRULY unnerves me about The Lovely Terror? The goddamned blush, man.
Of all the strangeness this makes evokes, the most strange aspect has to be the blush. There's just something truly otherworldly when the blush is added to this thing, and gives it an entirely different feeling then it would have had it been blushless. I could see this being the mask a cult uses in a low budget indie horror film. It's just got that sort of vibe to it. In all honesty, it reminds me very much of the mask from the episode (cleverly titled, and I mean that in both a non sarcastic and sarcastic manner) "The Mask" of the series "Courage The Cowardly Dog".
The Lovely Terror is, and this may surprise you to hear me say this after all I just said, actually quite an amazing piece of work. It is simple, yet effective. It is beautiful, yet terrifying. It is intriguing while being so ominous that it makes you not want to learn more. It succeeds in spades. It's simultaneously nightmarish and stunningly gorgeous.Whether this is a mask to be worn or a mask to be hung on a wall as an art piece, it's glorious either way. I also find the way it's mimicking the human face in a semi distorted fashion brilliant, because, as I said at the start of this blog, everyone is always wearing a mask of some kind.
Whether you're in the closet or you're putting on makeup or whatever the reason is, we are all wearing masks, so to make a mask that is to be worn over your face that then looks very similar to a human face is just all the more unnerving and jarring. You look at it and think, "This is supposed to be a person, right?" but you can't say that with genuine confidence or certainty, because it's differences are just enough to make your brain wonder if what you're looking at is human or not. Brilliant. So simple. A simple shape, three base colors, simple facial design. Yet, it's so perfectly complex at the same time, because of the effort it took to make it simple.
This is why I love art. This is why I love masks.
But we do all wear them, and The Lovely Terror is, in presence and in name, a mask we ALL wear. We're all lovely, and we're all terrified. This mask is all of us, and for that, it deserves our respect.
All hail The Lovely Terror, for they are we.
Comments
Post a Comment