Untitled

I’m liking this brooch by Tatty Devine for the Tate museum store.

It reminds me of a short story I wrote in my senior year of high school called Lint about a young girl, Lynn, who’s feeling lost and alone and useless since her father passed away. She spends her time watching the world pass by from the anonymity of her apartment window feeling like a speck of lint floating aimlessly in the air, bothersome to anyplace she lands. After a series of events she finds her self face to face with a young woman who she’s noticed whilst sitting at her window. The woman, Arianna, who Lynn finds out is an artist living in a colorfully vibrant home, shows the young girl kindness and friendship. Arianna eventually takes Lynn back to her studio where upon she reveals that she’s been painting the young girl, sitting at her window up above. Lynn is incredibly touched seeing herself in this new light, and though the painting is unfinished she can see the beauty it could become. She starts to see herself that way, too – as an unfinished painting – and doesn’t feel quite so lost.

Perhaps the story is a little cheesy (?), if so, forgive my 17 year old self; but it’s around the time I started thinking of the “self” as a possibly a piece of art, and subsequently life (as the top of my page states). I think it’s nice to think of it that way. Everything just a piece of the puzzle, a swab of paint on the canvas. Individually, they recall the hurt and the joy, the peaceful moments and the tense, the love and the loss…but together, when you step back and look at them all splattered there, it has this sort of beauty, the pieces of your life. When you step back from being “inside” the picture, the moment, you can see this better… see that even a tough time is just a fraction of the whole, that sometimes you can build something wonderful atop that toughness, the chaos. And it allows you to feel a little calm from within the storm.

And that’s why I like this brooch. Because we should always think of ourselves as works in progress. There’s always someplace to go.