Beautiful Losers

A scene from Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Beautiful Losers: From Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Tragic heroes/heroines explored visually

Art education unfortunately tend towards abstraction. Without a keen sense of direction, young artists can easily become frustrated. When everything is a potential subject for an artistic piece, nothing really is. Too many choices can cause these burgeoning artists to become overwhelmed by an overabundance of options. What was once a pleasurable activity, a form of welcome expression, becomes anything but.

One way to help make the process of artistic creation more simple is to create a theme. By providing a unifying principle around which students can weave their creative powers, they can create something new out of the familiar, transforming their lived experience into an artistic piece. For example, we can tether the process of creating art to reality by basing it on narratives that we are already intimately familiar with. Stories that we know, pieces of popular culture that we can relate to.

One of the most interesting archetypes in narratives is that of the outsider. Someone who lives on the periphery, a person who plays by a different set of rules. Beautiful Losers, an exhibit featuring the work of Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) Cartooning and Illustration students at the School of Visual Arts, was held at SVA’s Chelsea Gallery in Manhattan. To help give the exhibition a sense of focus, and the students a tangible purpose, these young artists were asked to research the theme of the tragic hero or heroine from as far back as the expulsion from paradise. There were few formal restrictions for their creative process. One requirement was that the source material for their artwork be a piece of fiction. Another was that any produced work was required to incorporate text written by a notable author. The artists used a variety of different written works, and other highly regarded source materials. These included Alan Resnais’s film Last Year at Marienbad, as well as the books Death in Venice by Thomas Mann and The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O’Neill. Famous characters included in the exhibition included Jay Gatsby, Hamlet, Peter Pan, and Holly Golightly.

EdLab’s Yangdi Xue created an illustration of a scene from Truman Capote’s iconic novella, and Blake Edward’s subsequent movie, Breakfast at Tiffany’s for Beautiful Losers. The female protagonist Holly Golightly is enamored with the famous department store Tiffany’s. With a grace and eloquence that contrasts greatly with her humble rural upbringing, Holly meets Paul Varjak, an aspiring writer. She affectionately calls him Fred, after her beloved brother.

For her illustration, Yangdi chose a sweet, flirtatious scene in a corner store. Celebrating Paul’s first published commission with The New Yorker, earning a plum $50 fee (!), they decide to make their way through the city to celebrate. After finding that their small budget cannot command much in a place as upscale as Tiffany’s, they eventually make their way into a local store. Ever the iconoclast, Holly teams up with Paul to engage in a low level heist — stealing some small trinket from the store. In the end, after browsing several aisles under the suspicious guide of security guards, they find their prey — a couple of doggy masks. After finding their booty, they sneak out of the store sporting the masks, undetected. Yangdi’s illustration depicts this whimsical scene.

Wearing a mask is a delightfully appropriate visual metaphor for Breakfast at Tiffany’s on a number of levels. The effervescent, New York sophisticate that Holly plays in the novella/movie is in itself a mask. Beneath the delicate veneer of über-stylish outfits, shiny baubles, and elegant makeup, she is just a simple, parochial girl from the country who channels her winsome looks and effervescent charms to sneak into big city society. Not to be outdone, Paul also dons a mask. He leverages his own golden boy looks to win patronage from a rich woman to start his fledgling writing career. These masks are projections of who they both want to be, the lure they use to win the other over, the one they both must overcome to lower their pride and come together as a couple.

Beyond Holly and Paul, tacitly fictional characters, we all wear masks. Our clothing, hairstyle, and accoutrements all project a sense of self — whether there is a real, purposeful intention behind these stylistic choices, or they are simply the end result of a series of decisions haphazardly made when we get out of bed and go to school, or work, in the morning. Our identity is formed by the thoughts we mull over, the decisions we make, the actions we take. A mask, worn for a long enough period of time, becomes our reality, whether we like it or not.

At first glance, the term Beautiful Losers seems to be an oxymoron. We live in a society that venerates beauty seemingly on par with other widely accepted virtues like fame and fortune. However, it is what is on the inside that counts. Whether we are a loser or not depends on our state of mind, and ability to cope with life’s challenges. No amount of beauty can change that. If life gives us a mask with an ugly exterior, we can always choose to change it with our inner beauty. As educators, that may be the best, most empowering lesson of all.

Beautiful Losers was exhibited at the School of Visual Arts Chelsea Gallery in Manhattan.