evisionArts Musings

T-shirts have somehow become an addiction. Not only making them, which is actually only a fairly recent event, but buying the suckers!

Since I have joined Cafepress, I have made friends with some extremely talented artists and they keep making these nifty cool tees. And then I have to have them. Take, for instance, this funky, retro Mod Veggies design from Rotemgear.com. I took one look and knew I was a goner. How can one possibly resist neon veggies? I thought you would understand. It is now one of my prize possessions, and I intend to show it off as soon as possible.

At the same time I purchase the Veggies, I was seized by a strong and irresistible compulsion to wander over to Bradley Schenck’s Retro-Futurist Design Shop. Yep, that’s correct, retro-futurist. Take a look, you’ll see what I mean. Bradley’s artwork is stunning. I was forced to obtain a Sun Horse, Moon Horse ash grey tee. There simply was no point in trying to escape, the credit card had already leaped into my welcoming hand.

My poor suffering karma then decided that the only way to make up for my rampant consumerist urges was to make my own tee and offer it up as a sacrifice in the marketplace. OK, maybe not a sacrifice, but offer it up anyway. Personally, I like to feel that I am merely doing my part for the stumbling economy. Since pugs are a frequent and persistent muse, I was not at all surprised when this rather disgruntled fellow, a butterfly atop his quivering nose, leapt from my fevered brain to the computer screen and then onto shirts and such.

Of course, in order to maintain this crucial balance, I must immediately begin looking to secure my next t-shirt treasure . . .

Well the fact that I just finished the latest Harry Potter book may have something to do with it, but all of a sudden I was struck be the unshakeable need to create a puggy angel.

These artistic inspirations often come upon me suddenly, and quite often at the most inconvenient of times. There you are, trapped – uh , that is to say – enjoying a meeting with a client and while they are talking about the best way in which to ensure that no one in their right mind will ever visit their web site, you suddenly start seeing little flying pugs hovering around their bobbing head. Do you know how hard it is to turn a laugh into a believable sneeze? I do have to say, however, that I have personally perfected the technique.

Artistic inspiration is not patient. When a flying pug wants to be born, it does not perch behind your ear and calmly wait until you have a free moment. On the contrary – it buzzes around your subconscious driving you batty until you finally give in and find some way to give it form. Even then it’s not happy until you find a way to share it with the rest of the world.

And then, just when you’re congratulating yourself on finishing another piece of art … just when you heave a deep, happy sigh and you start breathing again … just when you’re all settled in for a nice evening of Trading Spaces with a big bowl of popcorn and that candy bar you’ve been hiding in the back of the fridge … yeah, I knew it was there … just when you’re all snuggly on the couch with the pug on one side and the cat behind you with her tail on your head … wait. Wait a minute. What the … and there it is. A brilliant green jewel of a tree frog hopping and bopping all around the sofa, leaping from pug to cat and back again … and you smile. Because the best thing about artistic inspiration is that you are never alone.

You may have noticed in the last few days that some cute little pups and one very vocal cow are showing up in the store. These little guys have been quite insistent about making their debut, and have been driving me crazy all week as I try to find time to put pen to pa - …uh, mouse to pad.

“Happy Pug” was originally conceived as “Holiday Pug” but apparently he got tired of only being around at Christmas. So he dropped his bone (well more likely he sat down and made a nice meal of it – he IS a pug), shook off his jingle bell harness, and leapt from his holiday scene into everyday life.

“Hungry Pug” is, of course, a familiar sight for anyone who is owned by a pug or similar insatiable creature. It makes no difference if you fed them an hour ago, or quite frankly even ten minutes ago, they are always hungry. As they gaze at you with those huge, soulful eyes, your hand - acting without any prompting from you – automatically reaches for the nearest treat box.

We interrupt this blog to bring you breaking news straight from Bulldog Central International Headquarters. Representatives of the International Order of the Bulldog have been lobbying for months to bring more of our special breed to evisionArts. After hours of intense negotiations, serious cuddling, plenty of snacks and several important walks in the park where we chased those pesky squirrels and took care of other important business, we have finally achieved a breakthrough. In the interests of international cooperation, we bring you “French Bulldog Puppy”. Thank you for your support. We now return you to your rather irregularly scheduled blog.

“Moo Cow” is not mad or even the least bit irritable. She speaks her mind in a calm, articulate and forthright manner. If only there were more like her.

Though I haven’t lived there in almost 20 years, I’m a Florida girl at heart. I grew up on the sugar white sand beaches of the Gulf and lived on a sailboat in the summers. One of my earliest memories is of flying down the sand dunes on toboggans and clutching soaring kites above a turquoise sea and an azure sky. I swam in the warmth of the sweet waters of the Gulf of Mexico, I ran enraptured through the gritty hot sand and –almost every Labor Day – I sat in front of the TV watching the latest hurricane headed our way.

The thing is though, they never actually arrived. Oh, they landed somewhere, or turned and headed out to sea, but we were always lucky enough to be missed by the main part of the storm, and so, to a child, a hurricane was simply a wonderful reason for a free day from school. Hurricanes were exciting and cool and the sharp wind and driving rain only made you feel more alive.

Those days are gone. My father and stepmother, who live in the western end of the panhandle of Florida have suffered through too many devastating hurricanes for them to ever be exciting for me again. My father’s beloved sailboat, Tara, the same one my sister and I cruised on every summer, has been injured twice and even now sits in dry dock as another furious storm, a howling, terrifying category 4 barrels down upon her. I can feel my worried father’s anxious heart breaking from across the distance as he acknowledges how helpless he is to save what he loves.

I come from a family of strong and resilient people. We don’t give up too easily, and we thrive on challenges. But there have been too many hurricanes too quickly, and I can hear the weariness and resignation in the voices of my loved ones, and my hand shakes as I lay down the phone. I am powerless to stop this ancient force from tearing their lives apart, and I know it. All I can do is watch, obsessively switching from news channel to weather channel to local channel, and wait for disaster to strike.

And then I remember the last few storms. And the flurry of e-mails and phone calls afterwards filled with dark humor, and yes even laughter and the sheer joy of being alive. And I smile. We are strong and resilient people. And we will go on.

I have a good friend who has a mother who is an artist. Ella is 84 years old and still painting and drawing stunningly surreal artscapes. I call them artscapes because they are not exactly landscapes, though in some ways they are, and they sometimes have figures and birds and sometimes not. They’re incredibly beautiful – wildly colorful, sad, angry and deeply moving. And some of the most brilliant ones have been painted in the last couple of years, while Ella has been dealing with several health issues.

For Ella, Art is Life. There is no separation. She paints as she breathes – creating art is intimately intertwined with her will to live. It is survival. It is despair. It is hope. I have known Ella for around 15 years, and she has lost none of her furious intensity, her razor edge.

Ella has only very recently begun to share her work with the outside world. She has made some prints from her paintings and is selling them. These are brilliant works of art from a master painter. She cannot bear to part with her paintings, and making prints has turned out to be a wonderful way to share her vision with others. Her work is not easy and does not bring instant gratification. It is inherently complicated and deeply satisfying on a physical, intellectual and emotional level. It is rare.

When I first met Ella, we connected almost immediately. Somehow we both knew that we shared an understanding of what it was like to be driven to make art. While it may not always be easy, it is a blessing to know your passion and to find a way to pursue it. It doesn’t matter what your particular love is, only that you find a way to follow to it wherever it may lead you. This means keeping yourself open to certain paths that, when they are first set before you, seem almost impossible to traverse – terrifying – unrecognizable – bewildering. I have found, however, that if you keep an open mind, and you just keep continuing along, it all starts, eventually, to make sense.

Ella came into this world over 84 years ago - into a world where the creativity and intelligence of women were not fully appreciated. Where she constantly had to fight just to survive, let alone to find the time to sit down and paint. And at 84 she is one of the defining artists of our time. Mostly because, through all the negativity and upheaval and disappointment she encountered, she just kept plodding stubbornly along on her chosen path.

And now for something from the Bad Cat

Visit the Bad Cat

I used to hate painting landscapes and still lifes. We used to get these kinds of assignments in “art school” every once in a while and I would feel as if the world were covered in damp shades of steely grey. I couldn’t seem to connect with anything outside myself. And how was I supposed to paint something I never experienced? Or at best experienced through the foggy lens of my self absorption.

As I grew older, and started opening myself up more to what was going on around me, I experienced an urge to document my environment. I didn’t really paint a landscape or still life I actually cared about until my mid thirties. The first one was actually rooted in my past experiences and things that reminded me of my childhood in Northern Florida. Iced Tea celebrated the simple comfort of an ice cold glass of tea on a sticky, sweltering summer day.

My first official landscape, Row Boat, was a kind of dreamscape inspired by my teen years, living on a sailboat in the summers with my Father and Sister. Some people have told me they experienced a sense of loneliness when looking at Row Boat, but for me it’s more about mystery.

My friend Miki is often inspired by her surroundings. I love the way her photographic compositions, filled with strong shapes and stark light, almost become abstract. Aspen Trees, for example, suggested such a strong sense of poetry within me that I was inspired to create a whole new site, www.earthandmoon.com, with art inspired by poetry, literature and nature.

I think what I’ve come to love most about landscape painting is the opportunity to put down on paper (or in pixels) a unique perspective on the world. When I look at other people’s landscapes I feel as if I am experiencing the universe through their eyes.

The art marketplace has changed. Personally, I would say it is for the better, though not everyone will agree with me. What some people see as dilution I see as personal power. A power that was stripped from the hands of the artist and is now returning to its rightful owner. I believe this is due to three things.

1. We can now control the means of printing
2. We can now control the means of distribution
3. We can now have direct contact with our audience

Previously, these things were often hidden from us, and made to seem as if they were magical and complicated. Our agents, brokers, publishers, dealers, etc. patted us on our little heads and told us they would take care of everything. And then they doled out the money like a parent giving a penny to their child to go to the candy store. And a penny was often all we received.

I do not believe that all agents, etc. are bad or greedy. That is ridiculous. They are people and they run the spectrum of virtuous to criminal and everything in between just like everyone else. But there are very few of them, and I believe they have or rather had an inordinate amount of control over what images most people saw.

Thankfully, that is no longer true. Through the power of the web and print on demand sites like cafepress.com (the one I happen to use) artist’s are suddenly discovering that they have the power to market their own art directly, and they are reaping the benefits though admittedly also sharing the frustrations of trying to reach the hearts and minds of the art buying public.

One of the consequences of both the internet and print on demand is the ease with which images can now be reproduced. I personally work mostly in the digital medium, and one of the things I often heard from gallery owners was that they couldn’t show my work because I didn’t have an original.

After hearing that a few times I sat down and tried to figured out whether I agreed with them or not. Did the fact that my work was created out of bits and bytes somehow make it less worthy – less, to quote the implication, original? Was the ability to reproduce it easily in various formats a negative thing? Was it no longer art?

I finally came to the conclusion - and I admit this took some time and soul searching – that the tangible thing – was not the most important thing. It was only a part – albeit and important part – of what made something art. It is not, however, the most important part – that is the image. And the image is an original as long as you’ve created it yourself out of your own experiences and with your whole heart, mind and soul. I most certainly do have originals. And I choose to reproduce them many times so that more people can experience them and hopefully be stimulated by them in some way – whether it’s joy,

It has a lot to do with the Brady Bunch. You see, it was 10 years ago and my partner at the time and I decided we simply could not miss the Brady Bunch movie sequel. Yep, that’s right; we actually planned – in advance – to go see it. Not only that, but since it wasn’t playing anywhere near us – we purposefully drove 30 miles to catch it in the strip mall infested city down the freeway. So we saw the movie and it was marginally OK. But – as we were leaving the theater discussing the psychological complexities of the Jan vs. Marsha relationship – we spotted it. A pet store. And, since we had a cat, we felt perfectly justified in wandering in.

There he was – trapped behind glass with only a plastic pork chop for a friend. The sweetest little black pug face you have ever seen. Within nanoseconds, a salesclerk dressed up like a Disney safari ride reject was breathing hot and heavy down our necks. “Would you,” his voice, reminiscent of Peter Lorre, crawled up and down our spines, “Would you care to spend a little time with the pug? In one of our visitation rooms perhaps? He gets so lonely in there, and we are just so incredibly busy we can’t possibly give him the attention he needs.” The store looked like it had maybe 1 customer every 3 days in a good week, but we found ourselves nodding silently.

The “visitation” room was a miniscule cubicle about 3 feet square. My partner and I squeezed into a corner, barely able to move for fear of dislodging the spindly cloth covered walls. Then they released the pug. He seemed to occupy every bit of space in every second of time. He was everywhere – around our feet, in our faces, on the cubicle floor, bouncing off the walls – and firmly lodged in our hearts.

Peter Lorre in disneyfied safari gear oozed up over the cubicle wall and breathed an exceedingly obscene figure into our bewitched faces. Our astonished gasps caused him to lower the figure slightly. My partner – moving in ultra slow motion as if trapped in a dream or some sort of alternative reality – pulled the credit card from it’s sacred resting place inside her fanny pack and laid it – naked and defenseless – upon the counter.

We were pug parents. Just like that. The credit card never quite recovered, and if we actually bothered to look at the monthly bills before we handed in our minimum payments we would probably find that he is still revolving.

What are deelyboppers? Yeah, try explaining that one to someone from outside the U.S.

One of my most popular pug paintings is the aptly titled “Deelybopper Pugs”. Deelybopper was born out of a request from someone to please make something that had both fawn and black pugs in it. As I thought this was an excellent idea, I happily obliged. She did not, however, specifically request that one of the pugs be wearing deelyboppers on its head.

So – you might very understandably inquire – what in the world possessed you to put deelyboppers on a pug? This is where, I suppose, I should immediately stand up and defend my artistic decision with an intensity and passion heretofore unseen in moral woman. Being perhaps a bit uncertain as to the “why” of the whole thing – I might even decide to confuse you with a bit of nonsensical art babble and then either quickly change the subject or suddenly recall an extremely pressing engagement. This question comes up quite often, however, and so I will now attempt to give the final and definitive answer to this important question.

What are deelyboppers?

Well they’re plastic hair bands, with, um, two long springy things on top and fuzzy balls or stars or some other shape, attached to the springy things. They were very popular in the late seventies. The only defense any of us really have is that it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Why did you put deelyboppers on the pug?

It seemed like a good idea at the time.