ART

There is a coffee house in Charlottesville where they feature local art on their walls. When I was there for a long weekend I discovered a guy named Mike Clark whose paintings were displayed so, every morning I would stop there and have a coffee and look at his work. They really weren't paintings but rather bas-relief images. That means he takes a photograph and then cuts part out of it to make a stencil. He puts the stencil on a panel and then uses drywall joint compound to fill in the stencil. It's really a unique medium, but here's what I liked the most about Mikes art; he chooses old junk and trash as the subject for his pictures. This is what he says on his website,

"In my paintings, I seek to capture the beauty in things that are marginal,abandoned, ruined. To me, traces of forgotten industries, such as old buildings, smokestacks, street signs, and pre-modern machinery, are inherently striking and physical, markers to the overlooked realities of daily life." -Mike Clark

I found it interesting because people usually associate art with the beautiful, I mean like nature or a woman, things that are already beautiful. In a way, if you think about it, it's kind of like cheating. Anyone with a little talent can reproduce the natural beauty of a flower or a landscape or a woman holding a baby. It takes considerable effort to release the hidden beauty from that which we have discarded. Mike has effectively redeemed that which has been marginalized by society.

So, when we look for beauty in our contextual lives perhaps we should look deeper. Transfixed by this conundrum, a seeming paradox; the ugly becomes lovely, I inquired about the art but, alas, it was quite beyond my means.