As the world falls apart, I find myself needing color and art and weird stuff and whimsy more than ever. Give me something I can look at and touch and love that I can keep safe here in my house. (For now, anyway, because who knows? Yeah. That’s my headspace right now.)
This was always one of the darkest corners in the space between our tiny living room and our tiny dining room…until I brought Leslie Fuquinay Miller’s lamp home with me from Baltimore. When she first posted a picture of it, the skull was holding a cigarette; here, I’ve given it a paintbrush (though I wouldn’t turn down a smoke).
The things around it are all items I’ve had for awhile, like the wee robin painting by dove rescuer Ashley Dietrich, the glass bowl from Hudson Beach Glass, the wren from a thrift shop in Kingston (I glued a paper clip on the back so I could hang it sideways), the clay jar with turquoise stones from my collector friend Cj Sánchez, the vintage cat mask from a flea market, the cicada pocket vase from an ebay seller in France, the wooden skeleton puppet from my librarian friend Michelle, the tiny turkey vulture from a young British painter on Etsy whose shop has long been empty. The green mask behind the plant is the first sugar skull I painted 15ish years ago, and the blue cat—he’s new, by one of my favorite artists on IG, Martin Rabbitt Atwell, whose bright colors are like medicinal espresso. When I moved a couple things around so I could hang it right above the lamp, I felt such a sense of peace.
Peace. There’s a word we won’t hear much in the coming daysweeksmonthsyears. So make the art, find the art, buy the art, sell the art. And remember that everything has the potential to elicit that art-inspiring peace, even a banana taped to a wall (for scale).
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