Beauty is scary. It both enthralls and places us on our guard. Beautiful women are haunting. Of course, I am talking about something vastly different from sexuality, for there is a profound difference between sexuality and beauty. Nevertheless, I am expressing a male perspective. Sexuality is primal. Aesthetics determines what we deem beautiful. Beauty is scary because it lays our souls bare. While sexuality triggers an adrenaline rush, beauty evokes longing. Longing = lose. Beauty transforms, mutates. It is infinite, yet it can never be pristine. Rather, beauty is forever offset against innate imperfections, flowering out of Mother Nature's very fault lines. I freely admit these words may be limited by virtue of my being a man fascinated by a particular beautiful woman. Still, I do believe that beauty is the beast.
The core image in Beauty is the Beast was sampled from a grainy photograph of the ORIGINAL Eurasian Goddess. Beauty is the Beast is a deeply textured web animation, composed of 348 frames. A high-speed Internet connection is absolutely required and I recommend using Firefox as your browser. Even with a high-speed connection, due to its density, the animation may initially run at a jagged rate, lasting longer than its intended duration of just over 2 minutes and 45 seconds. What I have learned from posting other computer memory intensive animations is that they often need to play through once before running at their proper rate. I acknowledge this is awkward, but I find there is a positive side effect. For me as an artist working in a new medium, transparency and process are very much related. Showcasing the process is part of the art. That initial slower run-through of the animation brings the process of its creation into relief. I am presenting Beauty is the Beast simultaneously on Illumination Gallery and my myspace page. I invite comments on the piece, which can be posted on myspace.