Where Tacky and Art Collide, To Make Tacky Art

Cat Manikin and Portrait of a Cat, Private Collection, My Dining Room, Pittsburgh, PA, 2014


A couple of years ago my mother-in-law, who took up painting in her retirement, painted this portrait of our cross-eyed cat, Peeps.  Then, the other day while I was at the art supply store, I came upon this life-like cat manikin and I thought, wow, this will serve as a wonderful companion piece to the Peep's Portrait!

The Cave Dwellers

                      Myotis lucifugus, Little Brown Bat, 2014

    Despite my unreasonable fear of contracting rabies, I am fond of bats.  I even did field research two summers for a local university tracking a colony of little brown bats nearby my home.   In the gloaming they would swarm out of their roost, tilting and dipping over the sky, feasting on insects until dawn.  We are years removed from that now, where dozens or hundreds of bats might be seen exiting a roost to hunt through the Pennsylvania night.  White Nose Syndrome (WNS) has claimed 7 million bats in the eastern US and Canada, driving some species to the edge of extinction.  Now when I see a bat I actually make a note of it in my journal, so rare an occurrence has it  become. 

    Stopping the spread of the disease has proved to be difficult, as every year since its discovery in the winter of 2006, WNS has been confirmed further north, south, east and west from its epicenter of Schoharie County, New York.  Mortality rates for infected roosts are between 90-100%.  A statistic cannot get anymore stark than 100%.

    Pray this is not the end of the fledermaus.

 

A Bloodsmoor Romance, of Sorts

                                         Teddy Roosevelt National Park, ND, 2009

This morning, like every morning, I called my mother.  She didn't have much to report, but she did mention that she wasn't too thrilled with the latest romance novel that my sister-in-law had downloaded for her on her Kindle.
"I don't know who this writer thinks she is, but she goes off on these long tangents of prose.  Just pages and pages of words that I don't even bother to look up because I would never use them out in the world.  And the book isn't even much of a romance," Mom declared.
"What's the title?" I asked.
"I don't even know."
"Who wrote it?"
"Oh, for pity's sake, let me go look it up....A Bloodsmoor Romance by Joyce Carol Oates," Mom said.
"Joyce Carol Oates!  Mom, haven't you ever heard of her?  She's a well-known writer of literature.  She's taught at Princeton forever."  I was flabbergasted, first that JCO wrote a romance, and second that my mom didn't seem to know who she was.  Is.
"Her name doesn't sound familiar, and I don't think she's a very good romance writer.  I mean, I'm not looking for smut, per se, but I want people's lives and their stories, so that I don't have to think about my own life.  You know what I mean."
"I think you want more near-smut than what this book is providing, and I don't think you want a narrative that's going to challenge your preferred easy romance reading experience."

We talked a few more minutes after that, but that's the gist of it.  I did go and look up A Bloodsmoor Romance and the typical response by readers is:  WTF did I just read?  And then they give 4 stars (out of 5).  I don't read a lot of JCO, the last of her books in my hands was We Were The Mulvaneys, but I may see if my local library has this so-called romance novel and see for myself WTF is going on.  Someone on Good Reads likened to what Little Women would've been like if Stephen King had written it.  My goodness.

Nude With A Bowl Of Fruit

While exploring the finer points of form and composition, I created this classic and eternal image.  Barbie, the doll, discovered naked at the bottom of the toy box, as is her wont, both compliments and contradicts the plastic bowl of fruit, augmenting the very crisis of identity that Barbie herself has evolved to represent.

No Water Weight

The desiccated remains of a 5 1/2 inch long (including tail) horseshoe crab weighs half an ounce.  Unfortunately I do not have an undesiccated horseshoe crab for comparison, but I am willing to go out on a limb and hypothesize that it weighs more.

Snowy Egret In A Dead Tree

Snowy Egret Perched On A Dead Tree, Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge, DE, 2014

For the last 4 + years my photography has been carried by a Pittsburgh-area gallery, an honor that I often wonder if I deserve, but then I look at other people's work and realize that we're all lost out here trying to find some kind of meaning, or purpose.  I sell a couple of dozen prints a year, not so much that I still don't have to work some horrid job out in the retail sector.  I despise retail, despise our consumer-based economy.  Sometimes I think that hate emerges in the starker aspects of my work, stripping away not only color but gradients of gray.

Why God Drinks

Every once in awhile you stumble across something so perfect, so relatable, that you wonder why it hasn't always been obvious in its existence.  Such were my thoughts when I saw this book cover.  I thought, YES!  This is it!  I mean, maybe not that my mother drank because we were rotten kids, because she didn't drink at all back then (even now she only has half a glass of wine with dinner), and I didn't drink because my kids were bad (I drank because I was a lesbian in a straight marriage, oh, those dark years...).  But, there's some kernel of a universal truth in the beautiful and passed out mother who can't take care of herself, let alone her family.  Heaped in pathos and ruin, it's what we fear is the true fate of humanity, with the mother figure here really serving as God, and the whole of the population as the neglected children, the 'bad' children that make God drink.  It's soul shattering.
Then I found out the the book cover is a fake, photoshopped.  Which just adds more validity and weight to my argument.