5 Transactions with Beauty
This is the first in a series of "5 for Friday" – five transactions with beautiful things – art, music, poetry etc – that will make it easy for you to infuse your day with beauty. Suggestions? Send them my way.
1. The Art Work of Lee Price
The art work of Lee Price continues to fascinate me. She paints nude women eating snacks, usually from overhead. The women are in private spaces – beds, bathtubs, kitchens. There is a great interview with Price at The Other Journal, and you can also read about her work at The Huffington post in an article by Priscilla Frank. In it she says:
Binging on Doritos, Twinkies and jelly donuts, Price uses her body and habits to access a strange food-centric phenomenon that is hard to explain and harder to control. “The aerial view evokes the feeling of an out of body experience: the subject is watching herself engage in compulsive behavior but is unable to stop,” she explains. “There is an absurdity to the repetition of this act of compulsion. At the same time it is an attempt to find real nourishment.” Rather than label women’s eating habits as good or bad, Price playfully explores the serious reasons women occasionally indulge in absurd eating rituals, asking what it is they’re really looking for. Lucky for us, she does so in a rather gorgeous manner.
Painting by Lee Price
2. Instructions on Not Giving Up by Ada Limón
A poem by Ada Limón which can be found on Poets.org. I think a lot of us need these instructions right now, at least I do.
Instructions on Not Giving Up
by Ada Limón
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
3. Sheku Kanneh-Mason Playing Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah
This video has been getting a lot of attention which is lovely. You can read more about 17 year old Sheku Kanneh-Mason on CMuse.
4. Beautiful Inspiration by Brian Eno. "Everything Good Proceeds from Enthusiasm."
"Sometimes you listen to things and you think I've only really had one idea in my life and I've just been doing it in a hundred different ways ever since."
5. Dawn Chorus – Morning Birdsong on a Smartphone App
Audubon has given us the head's up to a free app. Most mornings this spring, I've awakened to the beautiful sound of real birds out my window which I love. I'm definitely getting this app though for the winter months, when the windows are closed and the birds are scarce. What's more beautiful than waking up to the sound of your favourite birdsong?
