Is It Beauty In The Eye Of The Beholder?

From when I was 6 years old.

When I started painting, which I don't remember when, it was just because my mom did it. My world was small, and my main function in it was to shadow her. Painting wasn't observing beauty or taking time off or understanding the larger nuances of life at that time. It was just colours and shapes. And I liked using my hands to create it. So it was fun.

But as I got older, especially around adolescence, when I thought I was the ugliest person in the world because I didn't have clear skin or shiny arms or hair like celebrities or curves that made my outfit pop, the more I painted, the more I realized that it's harder to paint the face of an old woman than to paint that of a glowing model, a dying flower than one freshly bloomed, an old dilapidated hut than a big shining mansion. As the effort I put into capturing the details of the dying flower, the wrinkled face or the half-destroyed hut increased, I realized there was nothing either unpleasant or unlikeable about it. In fact, the details and the colours gave it more life and context worth musing about.

As days went by, I slowly stopped minding catching myself in the mirror. Sometimes, I even stopped to look. Gradually, my acne scars didn't seem like the worst thing in the world. My hair was nice, I liked that I had white strands here and there because why not. I liked that I had crazy thick eyebrows because it just seemed to go with my face. And slowly and steadily, I started to like seeing myself in the mirror. Because I liked what I saw.

Painting - say a deserted and frozen lake, a dying rose on the road or the smiling face of a shrinking old lady - removes the object in focus from the context it is generally present in for here it’s not what you look at, it’s what you see. The beauty of the dying rose on the road is the exchange of affection it was almost a part of, the beauty of the wrinkled face is the stories it has lived through and the beauty of a dilapidated hut is it's persistence through destruction and the emotions engrained into every bit of it.

So if you think about it, it's actually not beauty that's in the eye of the beholder. It's ugliness.