a jar of happiness

Sound, words and images are essential components that together create a characteristic for a song. If you opt out one of the component, the characteristic of the song might change a little bit.

It's kind of obvious that my current musical inspiration is Billie Eilish. The characteristic she brings to her products is very sad, but sad in a different way.

In October 2018, she released the music video for When the party's over with a very strong and exotic image. I thought the image was very impressive, so I created a silkscreen piece for it. As I said earlier, Billie, to me, is a very sad person. That's why I put a little jar containing her tears and call it "jar of happiness", because she cries all of her happiness out.

As Barthes described Beethoven in Image, Music and Text:

The artist is in search of his 'truth' and this quest forms an order in itself, a message that can be read, in spite of the variations in its content, over all the work or, at least, whose readability feeds on a sort of totality of the artist: his career, his loves, his ideas, his character, his words become traits of meaning.

 Can you still read the sadness of Billie (through my piece) without listening and watching the video?