Renaissance Existence Network

You undoubtedly know of Lolita, the controversial 1955 novel by Vladimir Nabokov. You're also likely familiar with the Tokyo-born style subculture of the same name that consists of ruffled petticoats, lace hair bows, and pink parasols. Despite the little-girl attire and coquettish sensibilities, Lolita the style and Lolita the book come from completely different places.

Originating in Japan in the '70s, Lolita fashion was a reaction to the contemporary trend of showcasing a woman's body through formfitting clothing. This was a way to set their own rules about getting dressed, engaging with their clothing, and what was considered a "good" outfit. Small communities grew throughout Tokyo, an industry sprouted up to accommodate demand, and pretty soon, Lolita fashion became renowned beyond the streets of Harajuku.

So, when we found a group of young women in Amsterdam who get together to dress up in Lolita gear, we weren't all surprised. We visit a group of women in The Netherlands who've come across a newfound confidence in a style that's traveled halfway around the world to find them.

"When I was little I was the typical girl who wanted to be a princess. It's not like I'm still a little girl who still want to be a princess but I just really love dressing up like this. My outfits are a kind of walking piece of art where I can just make it into whatever I want.

-Katie

During my 24 hour lay over in Amsterdam, I waste my time wisely by searching for a group of women taking their fashion cues from an era of purity and hyper femininity.

The Lolita subculture may have originated in Japan but this style takes its inspiration from the silhouettes and modesty of the Victorian era in Europe. Now, the lolita fashion style has come full circle back to a country with one of the most active fashionistas.

Who are these Lolitas and why do they choose petticoats over t-shirts and jeans?

I'm on my way to a wonderland of frills and bows, a hub of the Lolita community here in the Netherlands.
I'm about to meet a Lolita who has forged her own direction. She's never
really liked rules perhaps that is why her things stand out. In the Lolita community Linda Friesen is a fashion designer who has been working with the Lolita style since 2007.
Linda's distinct style may draw more from the Lolita's European roots than the Japanese subculture that first attracted her.

"I fell in love with the clothes because, they looked very rich like something I would want to wear. It gives you the chance to become that fairytale princess for that day. It changes your whole demeanor.

I've gone from being some grungy hipster to being incredibly ladylike."

-Linda

Katie has organized the petticoat and tea party with girls coming from as far away as Luxembourg and Germany to celebrate their personal style in a like-minded community.

"I always wanted to wear black clothes and then I suddenly discovered this style and I was like: this is what I want from life.

It enhances who I am rather than it hides who I am. It's just this group of really open-minded people and they don't really judge because they know what it's like to be judged. I like to come to the Netherlands a lot because people here are more open minded."

-Cathleen

When I arrived, I thought Lolita style might be a simple statement against an over sexualized modern-day culture but what I found instead is a longing to reconnect with a bygone femininity and fairytale atmosphere. As a group, they found strength through friendship and a fashion that creates a world that's just for them.

September 15, 2018 No comments

August 10, 2018 No comments

Owen Cain is six. He can't move or speak. For years, Hamilton wasn't sure he understood anything he told him. Then one day, he started writing.

By Hamilton Cain
I've just spent the afternoon running errands around town. As I turn the key in my front door, I listen for signs that my son Owen may be in trouble. But today I hear only the blessed whoosh-whoosh of Owen's ventilator as it pumps air in and out of his lungs. I glance at him through his bedroom door: he's reclined on a foam pillow, napping. His heart rate is normal, his oxygen saturation in the high nineties. Perfect. His day nurse, Robyn, is jotting notes in his chart. She looks up and hands me a note.

Daddy: you are so very great. Your family loves you so much for doing family stuff always. I love your you. Your son, Super Owie.

An ache stings at the back of my throat. I swallow a sob. Although he's six years, Owen has never spoken a word. His disease paralyses him- he can barely move his arms and legs, much less his lips. I'd long ago written off the idea that we would ever communicate.
Then, last summer, we put a pen in his hand.
When Owen was born, he went into respiratory distress and spent 7 months in intensive care. He was suffering from spinal muscular atrophy, a disease in which the signals between the spinal cord and muscles are weak or, in severe cases, nonexistent. Although his health improved, my wife and I confronted the fact that he'd remain mostly in bed, immobile, for the rest of his life.

Beneath the straightjacket of his disease, a primal instinct flickered: he began to vocalise a few rudimentary consonants, "g" and "k" and "s". After his discharge home, though he fell silent as he grew older, he found his own ways to convey discomfort, annoyance or pleasure. As he approached pre-primary age, we enlisted a team of therapists to help him, but saw limited results. The speech therapist seemed especially concerned. "There's a window of time for him to acquire words," she said. "I'm just afraid that window's closing."

Late one spring evening not long after Owen's fifth birthday, we watched a documentary about NASA's mission to Saturn. As Owen sprawled on his left side, propped by the pillows, I noticed him staring fiercely at the screen, soaking in the details. Now, the narrator intoned, Voyager 1 is the furthest human made object from the sun, more than 16 billion kilometres away, racing at the speed of 17km per second. Mountains will crumble to dust, continents will merge and break away, the sun will wink out and still Voyager 1 will continue on its airless curve for billion of years, shooting away. Forever.
I felt dizzy and needed something to ground me in the here and now. I switched off the television and played a song at low volume, dancing Owen's hand to "My Flying Saucer", a Woody Guthrie lyric set.

My flying saucer, where can you be

Since that sad night that you sailed away from me?

My flying saucer, I pray this night

You will sail back before the day gets bright...

As the chords faded, a despair opened up inside me, as vast and empty as space. Owen was peering up at me, wide awake, eyes moist. His thoughts seemed to swell the room around us. I was positive that he wanted to say something to me. But what? How could I give my child his voice?

One month later, Owen's occupational therapist figured out that if she gripped his wrist at a particular angle, he could wield a felt-tip pen. As summer turned to winter and then spring, Owen's spare letters evolved into a fluent script, each entry brimming with distinct idioms. Mom, I love your you. (We believe he means "your essence") Sometimes he'd embellish a note with cartoons: a ripple of clouds, a scrawled daisy, an inverted Pacman that he claims is his symbol for laughter.

Today, he writes a request : Would Robyn read aloud a book about space? She kneels and fans four books across the parquet floor.
I lean against the doorway, lulled by Robyn's serene delivery. A quiet exhilaration pulses through me: my boy, his curiosity bursting through the cage of his body to touch the vault of the universe. After she's done, in a surge of bravado, he asks for a test. Robyn sifts through his space books, scribbling questions on a tablet. She tells him the test will be difficult.
I linger in the doorway again until she brings the completed test for my review. He's scored a perfect hundred, my little boy with the twisted body and limpid eyes, determined to make his mark in the solitude of his room.

My flying saucer, fly back for home! You'll get lost in the universe alone!

I kneel beside Owen and squeeze his hand, a communication that transcends mere words. From this moment forward, we will carry on the most intimate of conversations, our sentences woven into a tapestry as sumptuous as a night sky. It's the story of parent and child. And finally, we'll be able to write it together.

©Gerrishon Sirere

July 17, 2018 No comments

Russell Simmons once said art is a way to express yourself and through that you can escape a bad situation.

There are literally thousands (or even million) of ways visual artists express their emotions through their art. In fact, simply making while emotional will result in a residue of those emotions reaching the canvas, paper, board or other material.

The more skilled an artist becomes the more they are able to weave their emotional state into a process where the emotion is a critical part of their art.

Where can we see it?

Brush strokes, colors, topic treatment
This sounds a bit ethereal, but we can see or feel when an artists really challenged a topic - confronted the emotions within themselves.
It’s NOT true that extreme or hot blooded emotions are the most important. In fact, we often remember softly liking, being incredibly impressed by something, connecting with it, feeling a sense from it - all pretty soft.

There are many incredibly arcane academic training institutions that teaches that art is about ideas. Yet the great more recent art (that which survives the test of time) generally reveals emotions and is inherently emotional. Older art often captures an emotional sense while being less overt about it. Yet we can’t look at two people or a place or thing or any painting or drawing or sculpture without feeling emotion - even if that feeling is revulsion at the dry isolation of it to ideas.

RELATED QUESTIONS On QUora.com

What are some ways to express your emotions through art?

Why are the arts often used as a way of expressing emotions?

How can I start expressing myself through art?

Why do humans express their emotions in art?

Can emotions be expressed effectively through painting, like in music?

I ASKED SOME FOLKS IF ART IS THE WAY TO EXPRESS EMOTIONS. HERE'S WHAT THEY HAD TO SAY

Nick Kok, Fulltime Artist, Commercial Artist, Web Art Instructor

©Gerrishon Sirere June 22, 2018

I honestly don’t know. Right now I am primarily working in pen & ink. I do interior northern rainforest scenes. They are an extremely fine detailed representation of what I find when I hike in the Pacific Northwest. I don’t think about placing any emotional value in my art and yet others can tell my state of mind at the time of creation. How? I look at my work and don’t see it, are they just making this up. Trouble is that their interpretation of my emotional state is always accurate and it drives me nuts. I hide my emotions quite well but, apparently, not when I create my art. I believe that in the act of creating art the emotional element bypasses my conscious thought process and buries itself in the image. Either that or everybody is just messing with me.

Yotam Zohar, Professional Artist and Classically Trained Painter

©Gerrishon Sirere June 22, 2018

I would encourage you to consider the role of the artist less as someone who expresses emotions and more as someone who expresses ideas.

Expressing an emotion simply means acting upon it in a way that is perceptible. Artists do this the same way everybody else does, and the notion that artists somehow use their jobs as their emotional outlet has implications that are potentially damaging to those in our discipline.

It’s not that artists never express ideas that contain emotional baggage or connotations, but those emotions don’t have to belong to the artist. For example, a painter working on a painting depicting the horror of genocide does not have to have been a victim of genocide in order to express the idea of the feelings associated with that kind of victimhood.

In many cases, strong emotions can actually get in the way of the kind of productivity and attitudes that are needed in order to create artwork. Ascribing artistic achievement to simply “feeling something” undermines the effort, discipline, and skills required to make art.

Graham Hansen, Producer/vocalist at Handsome Graham

My art forms are music and writing, I love to sit down and just create a new thing that sounds different from the thing I made yesterday, write a story, or write song lyrics.

I’d say the emotional influence is subconscious. It’s less apparent in the instrumental, where however I feel that day might have only a subtle impact on the notes I wrote out. But when it comes to words, oh boy.

Anything expressed artistically in words is a window to the fucking soul. I’ve been embarrassed to share my music with people because of the content of my lyrics being very very personal. But there’s just no other way to do it. Writing words just to write will sound inauthentic, and it’s hard to nail down why, but people can tell. When I first started writing raps, my friend heard what I was doing and encouraged me to “just be real.” I was talking about things I’d never experienced or really felt, and it showed to him.

It’s like the episode of Futurama where Bender wants to become a country music star: he writes all these songs, but people don’t like them because he hasn’t lived any of these experiences. So he goes out into the world and lives out the exact plot of the songs he’d written previously, and when he gets back, people love the songs. Authenticity is huge.

So I rap about the real influences and issues in my life. Maybe they aren't mainstream topics, but it’s just what comes out. You can only do what you know, and I know myself pretty well. At this point, music and writing are such great subjective outlets that I’m not sure how I’d express my emotions sufficiently without them. Creating is how you express yourself.

There really is no other way to make art but for it to come from the heart and express (and even expose) yourself.

Cindi Murphy, studied The Arts & Philosophy at Orange Coast College

Through your art you can create a disturbing image, a beautiful pastoral scene, an amazing photograph. To achieve the results you're looking for you just express yourself in whatever way speaks to your emotions and creativity.

Julia Yeckley, i have emotions. i dont want them, nor do i try to exlain. they dont make sense

Lots of ways. Something as color, or. Lack of it. Subject matter. And how they portray it. If you look into an art exhibit a painting, or photograph for instance. You can start to see what the arist sees. Or his view on the world. What makes him angry. Or what field his love. Or there are different artists who are associated with different types of art. Like van gough had, abstractism. Picasso had different periods of color. Whatever his reasons he painted things in blue shades or I believe red. He had several but his blue period seems to be the most infamous. Andy Warhol started pop art. The tomato can that's just so popular. I don't get it. But that's probably the point. That there isn't one. Can you imagine not having any of that and coming up with random pictures and putting them in an exhibit, and have people act confused. My kind of exhibit.

Bethany Stanyer

When artists draw emotions into thier art is by useing different shading and colours like if it a happy piece the colours would be bright and shading not dark but if its sad the artist will use dark colours and dark shading