I titled this piece Wendy’s Sandy Waves. It’s a young woman sitting on a beach. I used a previous drawing I’d made last year called Topology of Hearts, Hands, and Minds for the patterns you see in her upper torso, the foreground, and backgrounds.
The idea here looks as if you stumbled upon a mermaid on a shore in your wild daydreams. I made sure the fishnet hose make the woman’s legs look like scales on a fish, thus alluding to my abstract pisciform drawings.
Delving deeper, I wanted to convey how beauty can have a tendency to reduce one’s ability to reason, analyze, and calculate. In particular, I’m thinking of how a woman’s physical attractiveness can paralyze an average guy’s ability to reason and think clearly in her presence. I interpret this as a form of power. I have no desire to alter that power either because I enjoy women’s beauty.
There are other things that can cloud, not only a guy’s reasoning abilities, but anyone’s reasoning abilities, such as the emotion of sadness for example. Sadness is in fact used in marketing and advertising so as to weaken a target audience’s natural resistance to being exploited. It’s called “sadvertising.” One ploy I have noticed, since my grandmother used to send checks in the mail to different organizations playing on her pity, is the usage of starving children, abused animals, or desecrated landscapes due to corporate-state greed.
Those last three examples I used are definitely unfortunate activities that do overwhelmingly occur in our world, and I am glad that there are people who stand up against them and work to stop them. What I want to describe here however is a point that I’d like you to be aware of. Those unfortunate events are specifically used by some people to weaken your critical thinking abilities in order to get you to open your wallet to them.
The same goes for beauty. Again, I have no interest in campaigning to stopping the usage of beauty throughout advertising. In fact, I encourage and celebrate it. What I’d briefly like to teach is the retainment of your critical thinking faculties for your own good in the face of manipulations that might otherwise overwhelm you.
Long ago, Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, wrote about rhetoric, and how rhetoric is used to deceive, to persuade, and to seduce. Politicians of all time are good examples of how speeches, debates, and campaigns are used relentlessly to manipulate populations. Questionable stories from centralized media treatment plants are repeated ad infinitum to instill thought for the mainstream. Extensive logical arguments can be used to wear out a target audience’s mind for example, and then heart rending situations can be presented to basically emotionally body-slam them.
In mythology, mermaids are sometimes seen as rescuers for seafarers encountering water bound perils. Water is often a symbol of emotions, and stormy seas are symbols of overwhelming emotion. A mermaid can be seen as a saving emissary for a wayward soul caught in the torrents of his or her emotional deluges. So my work of art here is intended to bring peace, but also excitement and wonder to you as you explore new landscapes in your mind.
I realize some people see me as cold and calculating, and in some ways they are right. The word calculate has the Latin root word calculi in it, which means stone. My name Evan in Hebrew means stone. So I find myself playing roles of calculating, analyzing, and assessing according to my name.
Art of eVan 