Pretty.

If anyone ever wants to commit a robbery, you can always hire me as a distraction. I’m so good a disturbance I can trick myself into doing the completely opposite thing I set out to do. I get distracted by pretty things. So if it’s a jewelry heist and I’m your getaway driver please keep the rubies and diamonds out of site till you know we are not being followed. Otherwise, I will stop the car and demand to see the little beauties.

 In the same way a dog lover believes every dog is a puppy, no matter how big, ugly, fat or old, Art is that puppy for me. Art can be horrific, it can make me want to run away, yet still enthrall me. The piece can be completely awful, yet if powerful enough I will apply the word “pretty.”

Yes, pretty.

Which seems utterly ridiculous when I happened to be doing all essay based subjects which involve a slightly more advanced vocabulary. Somewhere in me, my 4-year-old self-squeals in delight I still use the word. I’m sure if my English teachers found this they would groan and throw a thesaurus at me. Whoops.

I think, the way I just used pretty can be encompassed as a watered down version of passion, the attachment you get to the art is a special connection, individual to each piece. Pretty, my pretty is a shovel into understanding art. My way to scratch the surface of a piece, in order to think as the artist, to understand what they want to me to feel. If you want me to get all philosophical about it I feel like it was that way Plato or Aristotle who tried to understand the universe through the eyes of a creator. Which I guess when looking at art, is essentially what you do.*

*If you’re playing pretentious teenager bingo you can go ahead and tick off “insinuating deep inner meaning”.*

I used to be completely confused by art, I didn’t really understand why people claimed a picture spoke 1000 words. Reading books was my way of understanding the world, still is. But paintings and sculptures are visual literacy, they encase hours of writing and redrafting (which artists do too) into one virtual object. Like from one painting by Edward Burne Jones who painted dark romantic worlds of Pre-Raphaelite knights and mysterious women, can tell me more about the political and cultural turmoil of the industrial revolution than a three-part documentary on the BBC.

Pretty fascinates me, I won’t go into the gender minefield of the word’s history because as I’ve used it so much I’ve created an offshoot meaning of the word that is special to me. The way I use pretty is a distilled version of my passion for construct. Not order, order can be terribly boring, but the conception and evolution of something unnatural yet completely accepted and painstakingly crafted. I use pretty so much I’ve made up a new way to use it. Which is unfortunate for all you other English speaking people out there.

When looking at the brutal torture of Bacon [Francis] or the theatrics of Rossetti [Dante Gabriel] I start a timeline in my mind of my feelings, reactions and knowledge of the pieces presented. I take my first impression of it, find how impassioned I am by the work to use the word pretty, in accordance to its name and discover what exactly the artist is telling me. Whether I just have to look into my copy of Gombrich (I hear the screams of art historians, and with this say “Don’t fret my darlings, for I have other books in which I use to further my knowledge of art!”) or just make something up in the moment. It’s a bit like story telling when you delve into art, so when you say a picture holds a thousand words you couldn’t be more correct, and every story needs a beginning.

My once upon a time is pretty. A springboard into history and imagination, from which the prose I produce in conjunction to Art is almost lyrics as a result of instruments. A beautiful compliment, but not necessary as everyone else’s feelings are evoked differently. So, if you still don’t understand pretty that’s fine. But please, if anything, get out there and find your own way of experiencing art. You’ll find it resonates through all structures within society, the temples of Greece? Look at the grills on the front of the Rolls Royce parked in the street, think pretty, and then say “why?”

Credits to the photos and paintings go to Paula Rego, Claude Monet, John Singer Sergent , Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Francis Bacon, Edward Burne Jones, Wikipedia, Saatchi, francis-bacon.com

If I have miss represented anything/ anyone or have used your image without your specified permission please email me (address can be found in contact me at top of page) and I will happily correct it or take it down.