Horrifying Beauty: A Junior Self-Portrait Diptych by Aleksandr Appel (2013)

I built my diptych off of the oxymoron that I created: ''horrifying beauty''. The oxymoron comes from an image in my personal poem that depicts me performing in a piano concert in front of a big audience, and the feelings that were going through my mind during that time. Aesthetically speaking, the left photo leads into the right photo with a curved line, coming from the blanket of the child.

Due to an extreme case of stage fright, when I play in front of a large group of people, I become very horrified. I always have a ton of thoughts going through my head about what will happen next and the potential consequences of those occurrences. In the diptych, I put the ''horrifying'' side of the oxymoron onto the left side. It depicts a young child covered up in a blanket who is scared because of a shadow of a monster on the wall behind him.

The photo on the right, represents beauty. At first, I did not know how to show beauty in a clever manner, because to different people, really anything could be interpreted as being beautiful.The sheet music in the photo is not by itself very aesthetically pleasing, or at least enough for the beauty becoming the primary purpose of the photo. I decided to go for an implied meaning in my photograph. The idea is that the photo makes the viewer think about music and the elegance of it, fulfilling my mission to transmit beauty.