As a make-up artist, I look at each face as a blank canvas. What to shade, what to highlight, what needs a pop of color. It’s the same thing as when I’m acting and taking on a new character. What character traits do they have? What do they wear? Even moments like this, right now, as I literally type words on a white screen I am creating art on a blank canvas. But when as a society did we start thinking as canvases only in the artistic sense? Is life not just one big ass Blick canvas stretching out before us, further than the eye can see just waiting for us to paint our emotions, creativity and soul onto it?
When did we all decide coloring inside the lines was the right way?
I’ve dedicated a lot of the past 3 years to spelunking through the deepest, darkest most cavernous areas of my soul, in an attempt to understand why I did what I did, why I thought what I thought and deciphering between what thoughts were actually mine and which had been implanted by someone or some media source that somewhere along the way I decided to adopt as my own doctrine.
It was a quest to find my genuine self and I realized that my genuine self didn’t like being confined by lines. My soul liked to dance and firework around and outside of society’s lines of right and wrong. If you told me color the cat, my cat would end up with big ass colorful wings on her back.
The greatest artists in the world became who they did because they listened to their true selves, whether that was constructing a building taller than anyone thought possible because of our society’s previous limiting beliefs, or creating the mind warping images of Picasso, the world is a better place because of those fearless dreamers who’ve come before us. This fact makes reality that much more boggling when day after day children are taught who to be, how to react to situations. “Man up.”A simple phrase that could shut down the emotion of a young boy who could have maybe been the next Shakespeare. #LikeAGirl, a hashtag that has taken the internet by storm and is now become a phrase of endearment for many young girls but in the past has torn them apart and squashed dreams because they were told their gender dictated their abilities in life.
F**k That.
We are born with every possibility in front of us, a literal blank canvas. We and we alone get the right to color that damn thing any which way we want. The canvas doesn’t judge our dreams, doesn’t set limitations, there is no line that says “not possible.”It is endless and begging for you to dream all over it. You want to be an astronaut? Great, this canvas is on an endless scroll, scribble the whole damn Universe if you want. Take back the damn paintbrush.
So I’ll ask you one more time; if the world was a canvas, what would you paint?