End rant... mostly.
On the ride to work today strange thoughts entered my mind. I was noticing the beauty in the sky as the sun was starting to rise and there were clouds and trees along the sides of the highway. For some reason a few memories entered my mind in fairly quick succession. One from a photography class I took, one of paintings in an art museum and one of a very nice gentleman that was happy and polite to me in a grocery store a few weeks ago. This also led to me thinking of models and a book one of the students is reading.
Anyhow, in the photography class we were taught to not line things up with complete symmetry, that the eye should travel across the photo and tell a story or something like that. I believe this is something that I learned or noticed visiting museums and looking at art as well. Some random book I listened to I remember mentioned that humans tend to find beauty in symmetry (which is what made me think of models). When I think about it, even the most symmetrical people are generally photographed off center in one way or another. Yet it is supposedly their symmetry that helps to make them attractive. The more appealing photo of the sunrise will have the sun to one side where it seems to shine on trees or a pond or body of water. A person may find an old gnarly tree to hold beauty and intrigue. Even a leaf will hold more interest if one edge is curled or there is a bug upon it.
The book a student is reading seems to be about a girl who was born with some kind of deformity. The student is only to read to for me a minute a day of the same page for a week so I don't know much of the plot. The character in the book is obviously struggling with adolescent issues because of her appearance. The very nice man in the store also had some kind of deformity or had had an accident at some point to disfigure his face a little. I didn't stare or ask. I generally am not the type to start a random conversation at a grocery store, although I like to think I am getting better at stepping out of my box. I did look at him when he spoke to me and saw the other, more important things--his kindness and happiness. Where the eye is supposed to travel across a picture, doing so in real life to a person is rude.
Is there a point I am hoping to make here? Not really. I am finding this symmetry vs asymmetry thing to be a bit of a dichotomy. Many would find the character in the book and the man in the store with their less than symmetrical attributes to not be attractive yet it is a lack of symmetry that is appealing in nature, although much of nature is also symmetrical. So the question that I may research, if my computer works again, is why symmetry is so important when most things that are beautiful aren't completely symmetrical? or something like that...
Or I could just be wrong...
Some pretty cloud colors.
Thank you for your time.
☮☮
