David Hendley on sat 25 dec 99
I'm with Polly.
I just can't understand why Lyle married a big-time
movie star. I guess he was just spending too much
time in Hollywood and forgot his Texas honky tonk roots.
If people were pots, Julia Roberts would be a white,
technically perfect china plate, decorated in the current
research-proven popular colors, made to maximize profit
and appeal to the most "consumers". For sale in the
bridal registry at Macy's.
Lyle, on the other hand, would likely be a handthrown
bottle, made with a coarse clay with a few iron burn-outs,
fired to cone 13 in a wood kiln. Slumped slightly and ash
encrusted on one side from the intense flame. Available
only from the potter.
So, which piece has more beauty? In pottery, as well
as people, I'll take something with character over idealized
perfection. I want to see evidence of the process and
evidence of screw-ups or serendipitous good fortune.
Glaze runs and finger marks are asymmetrical, but add interest
and tell a story, just as wrinkles, a squinting eye, or an impishly
downturned mouth on only one side of the face.
--
David Hendley
Maydelle, Texas
hendley@tyler.net
http://www.farmpots.com/
----- Original Message -----
From: Polly Goldman
To:
Sent: Wednesday, December 22, 1999 7:47 AM
Subject: Re: Symmetry/asymmetry aesthetics
| ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
| I just had to put my two cents in aboutt his topic. Several years ago,
| when the amazingly creative and funny musician Lyle Lovett married the
| boring, bland movie star Julia Roberts, I saw many newspaper & magazine
| articles in which the author wondered what she (Ms. Roberts) could ever
see
| in him. One article discussed how in humans, beauty is in symmetry. They
| cut a picture of Lyle's face in two, put two left sides together, and
| compared this to a picture of his real face, to show how asymmetric and
| "ugly" his real face was. Well, the whole thing surprised me, because I
| get bored of Julia's face in two seconds - to me, she always looks
underfed
| and like someone has been beating her, with those collagen-implanted
| swollen lips and sunken eyes. Lyle's unsymmetrical face, on the other
| hand, is forever interesting to me, kind looking, funny, and like there's
| "someone home there".
|
| What's this have to do with pottery? lots, I think. It doesn't take much
| to get people to see past the superficial symmetry, and once they do, they
| will bond a lot more with a piece with which they are familiar in complex
| ways. What's to bond with in that "perfect" morphed human face? Maybe I'm
| different from most, but those morphed human faces do not impress me. I
| think many people, including myself, are attached to art and crafts as
much
| because of who made it, why they made it, and little individual touches it
| may have, as because of how it appears superficially.
|
| That said, I had a friend once who claimed that some of my vases were far
| superior to others because of the presence of multiple "golden rectangles"
| in them. Are any of you familiar with this? It was some ancient Greek
| idea or something, that if you drew rectangles around forms, and the width
| was 0.6 (I think) that of the height (or vice versa), that was a Good
| Thing, and the more golden rectangles the better. I have since lost touch
| with the friend, but am curious about this idea, and haven't seen it
| mentioned anywhere else.
|
| Sorry for the rambling post. I'm on a ton of prednisone and codine right
| now to combat a nasty case of poison oak and the flu, fortunately neither
| are contageous over the web,
| Polly
|
Paul Lewing on sun 26 dec 99
David Hendley wrote:
>
> ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> I'm with Polly.
> I just can't understand why Lyle married a big-time
> movie star. I guess he was just spending too much
> time in Hollywood and forgot his Texas honky tonk roots.
>
> If people were pots, Julia Roberts would be a white,
> technically perfect china plate, decorated in the current
> research-proven popular colors, made to maximize profit
> and appeal to the most "consumers". For sale in the
> bridal registry at Macy's.
Actually, David, I think she'd be a white technically perfect china
vessel with the mouth then pulled out sideways to a grotesque
proportion. If you'd like to see what Julia Roberts looked like before
she hired a plastic surgeon to make her look like Froggy the Gremlin,
rent the movie "Mystic Pizza". She was gorgeous in a
Yi-dynasty-Korean-celadon-handthrown-on-a-slow-wheel perfect kind of
way.
Paul Lewing, who always hates to see beauty destroyed for money.
| |
|
