I'd like to try a different sort of post this morning, to accompany my earlier predictably
I'm going to do a post about a fascinating artist who became one of my very first LiveJournal friends. I'd like to introduce you all to the creative world of
I'm always interested in people who make art "outside the lines". I don't mean, necessarily, people who end up with sobriquets like "The Collin County Grandma Moses" (although I personally would be delighted to receive such an accolade) nor the odd "I collect troubled people's stories" art brut obsession. I mean instead people whose creativity shoots out like lightning, in unexpected ways. When you drive a freeway in eastern Arizona at two in the morning, you often see cascades of heat lightning, rainless, appropos of nothing, illuminating everything. I like artists who serve as the distant heat lightning for my own quirky creativity, less a direct inspiration than a kind of wonderful atmospheric electricity, keeping the entire planet alive and charged.
MarsTokyo serves as one of those heat lightning artists for me. She's
one of those people who has the chops to draw and paint "real" representational art, just like the artists in mystery novels, who sketch visual diaries just before being victimized, acquitted, or found out in the course of over-picturesque puzzle crimes. She's can charm with a photograph which is a delight of color and a celebration of the right eye (which, I've noticed, often resides in the left eye).
Although she's quite subtle, she's not wedded to mere obscurity. Some people, like me, show their appreciation for a favorite band by writing a kind review on Amazon.com. MarsTokyo showed her appreciation for a band which fascinated her with an incredible pictorial set of U2 Devotions.She's entirely willing to create art about the here and the now, and to make an art unaffected by the need to impress the viewer with her erudition. Although she's an intellectual, I think she'd be the first to tell you that she is an artist of the idea rather than an ideologue or someone who merely wants to make a point.
So many things about
Not all of us have a concrete life's work. For some of us, our life's work is just to love other people. I surmise that for a few of us, a life's work includes ample portions of chocolate manufactured in Hershey Pennsylvania.
Success serves so many masters as to serve as such a funny word. So often people mistakenly see success as exactly synonymous with economic gain. Some folks (and here I mean in particular some artists) imagine, by contrast, that all people other than creative people are driven only by money (a misperception rather akin to thinking that all people of faith are fundamentalists, or all left-wing political people are communists).
Here on LiveJournal,
I love this aspect of weblog culture--a talented artist makes her work available for the world to see.
I'm one of thousands upon thousands of people who discovered
I hope that someday