'somewhere...everyone is happy. somewhere...fish do not have bones.
somewhere...gravity cannot reach us anymore.
somewhere....you are not alone.'
My name is Aria Durso.
When i was a little girl, i thought my name was weird. Now, i could never imagine myself being anyone else.
I have always been what people call, "one of those creative types" like it explains every tiny thing about my personality.
How sometimes i'm shy, and sometimes i'm not. My obsession with details, texture, precision. How i find beauty in a mess, in a gray day, in a stillness.
My relationship with art started thick and fast. Art, in all its incarnations, runs amock in my family. When i was a little girl with eyes even wider than i have now, i thought it was magic that my father could make paintings look real. That the subjects, the dog, the cat, the apple, looked more colorful, and yet the same. He taught me how to draw horses. It didn't take me very long before i found i could not do what he did. My fingers, they couldn't make the perfect lines, the mirror image shapes. They couldn't pencil in the shadows and breath in the light. I did not have my fathers magic. I was fearful and angry at first, i felt betrayed. But, in time, i found I had something else. And I wanted to know where it could take me.
I've always made a million things. I always say, and know, that i can make anything out of anything. I always want to use my hands. My eyes find the texture, the color, the form, and my fingers shape it. Sometimes, i can coax my hands into using a tool, a brush, a sponge, an instrument of some sort. But its hard for me not to want to trust the shape of something exclusively to my bare hands. Tools become an extension of you, if you want them to and if your never stop practicing, but it hard not to instinctively reach for my paints and my pigments with just my mind and my fingers.
And so, I started making paintings and creating and creating. I made costumes, i made props. (i secrectly love props.) I started to find that i actually could make anything out of anything. I could make a super hero costume out of some old high heels and spare fabric. I could make a creature mask out of clay, and cherrios, and nailpolish. And i found out that what my fingers had learned from finding meaning in color and shape, i could apply to creating anything. It wasn't long before i wanted to apply these principles to the human form. I wanted to make people look like anything, to make them look like other sides and pieces of themselves. A human is a living piece of art. And there are sides and stories in the colors inside of them.
That's where makeup takes me. It's art and it's beauty and it's an artistic echo of reality. It's a middle line between surreal and realism. You can wear it on your face if you want to, like wearing your heart on your sleeve.
And it can be frightening, and dramatic, and intricate. Or deliberately simple. But it always has an element of beauty.
whoooooooooooooooo. ok. enough being existential.
so......me. and not the slightly melodramatic me who likes to sound smart. she makes her appearance in the paragraphs above.
i do love colors. i love shapes. i love redheads, and mermaids, and peter pan in any incarnation. i love 70s crime movies, the re-affirmation of the film noir. I'm completely obsessed with trees. When i was little, i used to pretend my bedroom was in the middle of a huge forrest, and my bed was made out of interwoven tree trunks, a canopy of leaves above my head. i still want that more than anything. i love english peolpe that sound english when they sing. i'd go so far as to say i'm completely jealous of them. i would sell my soul to be able to play solid metal riffs on a guitar. i love snow and cold, and turn into a soggy pumpkin in hot climates. i love scarves, almost exclusively the ones made by my mother. i love gloves without fingers, so you can be warm and still manage to function.
i have the most wonderful family. i almost think i love them too much sometimes. They show me everything i need to know. They are crazy, and unpredictable, and irrational, and sweet, and honest, and completely wonderful. But it doesn't change the fact that everytime they ask me if want to eat a hot dog, i feel like i'm in a seinfeld episode.
i love animals. all 24 thousand of ours are great.
Sometimes, i know in my heart, that if i don't create something of beauty and huge importance, that i will never be happy or fulfilled. But sometimes, i feel like i've already been given so much, it feels absolutely selfish to ask for anything more.
that's classic aria. the duality of my nature.
'somewhere...in a paralell dimension. happening now, but not within your sight.
the force that binds the universe together.
everything is gonna be alright.'
jarvis cocker...Quantum Theory
