The Sunday Paper: Beauty and Viewpoint


There is beauty in everything really, just depends on your viewpoint. Of course on the flipside of that, you could find negatives about something too, if you look hard enough and are focused on that aspect of things. Take a place like LA. I actually embrace the beauty of it as well as its flaws. I’m drawn to the palm trees, the mountains, the weather and even the smog. Now don’t get me wrong on that last part, as I would prefer the smog aspect to be a lot less, and I have seen an improvement in that over the years. But from an aesthetic standpoint, I do embrace that flaw of LA.

Take Brutalist architecture as a good example of this. Some would consider it ugly and barren and lacking in any real aesthetic, and in reality that may be so. I actually felt this way about it growing up, but now I find beauty in its simplicity and in its geometry. Someone like Rick Owens could well agree with that. He is someone I look up to as a designer, who celebrates the strange and the flawed aspects of things and makes them aesthetic and beautiful.

Hollywood Blvd is another example of this. The Hollywood Walk of Fame is far from the glamorous scene from a movie or the idea a tourist may get before the rude shock of actually visiting it. Then Gucci does a runway show on the Walk of Fame and celebrates the glamorous nature of it. Even as an Angeleno, it makes me appreciate more what we have in our backyard. So there is beauty and glamour in it, albeit a little rundown. This probably stems from the nostalgic nature of Hollywood films. I know it is that way for me, as movies growing up were mostly shot in Los Angeles. So when I am looking at things, I see it through that nostalgia, as well as what is really there.

So as I look things over as an artist and a designer, I can embrace the beauty in a flaw just as much as the aesthetic nature of perfection. Real life is not perfect, and art tends to imitate life. So why not embrace the imperfect just as much as the perfect and make them beautiful. A strange concept, I guess, but if you look at what is good about something rather than what is bad, you can find beauty in this world and perhaps create a little of your own. It is like looking at life through the eyes of a child, an unjaded look at the world with such interest and excitement and filled with possibilities.

Daniel Patrick