Beautifully Complicated: A Personal Wonderland
Part of the Music & Memories Collection by DeElla Hoberg
You don't need a concert ticket to get lost in music.
Sometimes all you need is a pair of headphones and a little time alone.
I was in my studio listening to Stone Temple Pilots when I started painting Beautifully Complicated.
My youngest son, Emerson, had recently gone through a bit of an STP binge, which brought all those old songs back into my life.
Not that they'd ever really left.
But there's something wonderful about hearing music you loved thirty years ago through the enthusiasm of your own kid.
Suddenly, you're remembering things you haven't thought about in decades.
And before you know it, you're right back in the 1990s.
The Beautiful and the Ugly
I saw Stone Temple Pilots a couple of times in the early '90s.
There's one image of Scott Weiland that has stayed with me all these years.
He was sitting on a chair beneath a spotlight in the middle of the stage.
He was incredibly thin. You could see every sinew of his shirtless body.
And then he sang.
His voice was so beautiful.
That's what I remember most clearly. The contrast between the fragile-looking man sitting on that stage and the extraordinary sound coming out of him.
Scott had this ability to sound almost angelic one moment and raw and ragged the next.
And the music itself could be just as complicated.
Beautiful melodies wrapped around difficult emotions. Songs about relationships, longing, anger, loneliness, and all the messy things that come with being human.
I've always been drawn to that tension.
I don't necessarily want music to make everything seem pretty and perfect.
Sometimes I want it to acknowledge that life is neither.
The Songs That Find Us Again
I remember watching the video for Sour Girl, with Sarah Michelle Gellar appearing alongside Scott Weiland.
That song, that video, and so much of STP's music belong to a particular chapter of my life.
But here's the interesting thing about music.
It doesn't stay neatly tucked away in the decade when you first heard it.
It follows you.
And when you hear those songs again, they bring pieces of your life back with them.
Sometimes it's nostalgia.
Sometimes it's sadness.
Sometimes it's the memory of someone you loved, a place you lived, or a version of yourself you haven't thought about in years.
And sometimes, unexpectedly, it's hope.
I can be working in my studio, completely absorbed in painting, and a song will come on that takes me somewhere else entirely.
Nobody looking at me would know.
But inside my head?
Oh my God. There's a whole world happening in there.
A Personal Wonderland
When I started painting Beautifully Complicated, I wasn't consciously creating a self-portrait.
But the more I look at it, the more I recognize myself in it.
Not because the figure looks like me.
In fact, I don't really think the figure needs to be male or female.
I want anyone who loves music to be able to see themselves in this painting.
What I recognize is the experience.
The headphones create this little private universe.
You put them on, and suddenly the rest of the world becomes a little quieter.
The music becomes yours.
Your memories. Your emotions. Your interpretation.
You might be listening to the exact same song as a million other people, but what happens inside you is entirely your own.
It's a personal wonderland.
And you don't have to be standing in an arena with thousands of screaming fans to experience it.
Sometimes the most powerful musical experiences happen when you're completely alone.
Why Wildflowers?
As I worked on the painting, wildflowers began to grow around the figure.
And I'll be perfectly honest.
I'm still not entirely sure why.
Maybe they represent the beauty of Scott Weiland's voice.
Maybe they represent all those emotions that grow and intertwine when we listen to music.
Or maybe there's something about the resilience of wildflowers that speaks to me.
I've always loved the scrappy ones.
The weeds that grow through cracks in the pavement. The flowers that pop up in terrible soil, without anybody planting or tending them.
Beautiful things growing out of shit.
There's something wonderfully defiant about that.
And when I think about Scott Weiland and so many other musicians whose lives were marked by addiction and personal struggles, I feel a particular sadness.
I wish more of them had been able to find the resilience of those weeds.
To survive the difficult things and keep growing.
Because some of the most beautiful music I've ever heard came from people who were carrying enormous pain.
And I wish they'd had more time.
Beautifully Complicated
Maybe that's why the flowers belong in this painting.
Maybe they represent resilience.
Maybe they represent beauty.
Maybe they represent the complicated mixture of emotions that music can bring to the surface.
I don't think I need to choose just one.
That's the wonderful thing about making art.
Sometimes you paint something because it feels right, and only later begin to understand why.
And sometimes you never fully understand it.
I'm okay with that.
When I look at Beautifully Complicated, I see the private world we enter when we listen to music.
A world where beauty and sadness can exist together.
Where a song can remind us of someone we've lost and still make us smile.
Where memories can hurt and comfort us at the same time.
Where hope can grow in the most unexpected places.
We don't have to make sense of every emotion a song brings up.
Sometimes we can simply put on our headphones, close our eyes, and feel it.
About the Artwork
Beautifully Complicated is an original 20 × 20-inch mixed-media painting on watercolor paper mounted to canvas. Part of my Music & Memories collection, it explores the private emotional worlds we enter through music and the unexpected beauty that can grow from complicated experiences.
I'd love to know: Is there a song that takes you somewhere completely different every time you hear it? One that brings back a memory, a feeling, or a version of yourself you thought you'd forgotten? Tell me about it in the comments.
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