Ugly beauty

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why certain spaces are considered beautiful and others are not. If you’ve read any of my other posts it’s probably obvious that I am drawn to asymmetry, imperfections, and other things that might generously be called “character.” Spaces only a mother could love.

Every day I do a few circuits around a local park that goes around a channel. The park exists primarily due to a law that requires public access to the water, so the thin strip of land snakes alongside some rough industrial sites. A make-do sort of park. But since life finds a way, the industrial/park edges are still bursting with shrubs, trees, wild flowers, and anything else stubborn enough to persist in those conditions. Think big, mean-looking plants with woody stems, overgrown shrubs that now qualify as trees, and flowers spilling over the edge of water. And because those are there, we get many birds and the occasional rabbit.

I’ll admit it’s not conventionally pretty, like postcard scene from the Cotswolds or rural France. There’s debris mixed in with the plants, and an unfortunate amount of that debris makes its way into the water. Back in late winter, there were straw erosion mats strewn and snaked all over the place to help seed new grass. I found it them beautiful in their own way: they were sculptural, fluid, almost organic. I enjoyed them so much I turned one (so far, as of this post) into a drawing.

Since this is apparently a pattern, it got me to wondering what draws me to spaces like this. Part of the attraction is the roughness itself, I think. The interesting bits haven’t been sanded away or smoothed out. It’s organic in the sense that the space isn’t 100% planned. Traffic cones chucked into the water were definitely not planned. It leaves room for the unexpected.

But more than that, it is the potential of the space. I’m such a visual person that I can’t not see what the space could be with just a bit more TLC, or a well-aimed fistful of wildflower seeds (native, of course). And I appreciate that the space exists - everyone in the neighborhood gets to enjoy the water, and being somewhere a bit wild and natural. No matter how it looks today, that is worth celebrating.

Not a bucolic cottage, but a warehouse and a sagging chain link fence surrounded by life