24/100 - Weird tree
There was a huge value in weirdness for my teenager self. Being called weird was a badge of honor, seeking weird music, weird stories and weird people was important. But these days I would question the narrow sense of weird I had back then, it was too binary; weird was the opposite of normal, and normal was bad.
Of course I had no idea how normal I was, and how much I would come to value normal. Teenager disdain is wonderful in some ways but there is much more depth in weirdness. I still seek it, I love that tingle, that sense of oooh there is something here worth exploring I get when I see weird art or read weird things.
I can see the risks in glorifying the weird, or worse yet exploiting the weird -the internet knows too much about that- but I'd like to keep on struggling with trying to articulate the value of weird things. A lot of these drawings are an exercise in this. Today's alien tree for example, it uses two old recipes for creating weirdness: mixing of dissimilar things and adding lots of eyes. The mix is of recognizable aspects of a tree with a blocky architectural element. I'm not sure that it's super weird but I like that I get a sense of mischief coming from some of the eyes, which is something I wouldn't have attributed to a tree before.
Weird things offer to me a catalog of surprising choices and a relationship to otherness. I like to see choices I wouldn't have made, or that wouldn't even have occurred to me, and that are in that sense unnatural, but I get to celebrate them anyway, and celebrating others can be wonderful.
I wrote all of this because I was thinking about one time I presented some of my art to a group of people and said that I made weird things because I thought there was value in that, and the world needed more weird things of the good kind. Part of me is still baffled by that sentence. And I also read this article recently called The Perks of Being a Weirdo (it makes you a better creative thinker) and it both lifted my spirits and got me thinking about it more.
This miniaturized celebration of weirdness is 2.5" by 3.25". Purchase link here(sold).