painted mirrors -- the face we choose

‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, please tell me a big fat lie,’ is the beginning of a fairytale, but turns out it’s true. Nobody else sees what you see in the mirror even though the silvered plate glass is one hundred per cent accurate. Those shades and that pompadour do sorta make you look just like Elvis but no one else sees it, and that goes for whatever the rest of us think we see in the mirror as well. We look at least slightly different to everyone on the bus, and that pretty much goes for the rest of the world as well. Turns out that everything we see is rooted in what we’ve seen before and limited by the span of our own experience. We’re not so complicated.

Babies arrive as hardware in search of software, and they imprint on everything until they eventually adapt to their family’s values and conception of reality. In adult life a broader experience yields a greater perspective and a wider, wiser view of life, and many people love to travel, sample ethnic food, and read books that extend their own experience into new realms. Movies and mass entertainment can insinuate artificial experiences into our personal version of reality, and as our culture comes ever closer to the dramatized ‘escapism’ of our leisure time, maybe it’s time to make a few rational choices about how we see ourselves.

Art won’t fix things, it’s not a panacea, just nice to have around to humanize the house. The artist makes a design on a flat surface that engages the machinery of recognition and when that channel opens a person might somehow see themselves, and can even see straight through the art to the artist. When such a piece of art hangs in their house it becomes a reflection of their character and passion for life that never changes, that doesn’t wrinkle and age like the image in the bathroom mirror. A few pieces of original art reveal their owner’s true identity, and help to remind them everyday of who they really are.