When Creativity Bites Your Ass

I love it. One customer personalized her world 
by buying all green plastic animals.

As it turns out, running a web store is not for sissies. Between the information I got a few days ago from Lee's SEO guru relative Ben and the expensive hour I spent yesterday on the phone with the Big Commerce SEO Team counselor, I've got my work cut out for me - about 1,000 to 1,500 hours' worth as nearly as I can estimate if we do it right, or even almost right. Things have changed a lot in the Google universe in the last year and a half. I thought we were following the guidelines reasonably well, but they have gotten more and more specific, and I also missed the boat in a big way when I tried to personalize the site in a way that works for me but not for Google. I have a nice web store, and the only reason I care about these guidelines is that we need to do better than barely breaking even at the end of each month. With expectations of cheap prices and free shipping, there isn't much margin for profit. This means I have to increase volume. 

Sales volume has actually dropped significantly since opening the new store. It looks better, it works better, but it does not generate more income. The new web store has made a good start, but anywhere between 15 minutes and an hour's worth of tweaking per page could make all the difference. The thing that feels overwhelming is that there are about 1,700 pages to edit in multiple places!

It doesn't all have to be done overnight, and it certainly won't be, but let the tweaking begin. I'm working way too hard for the kind of returns I've been getting this year. My old web store used to come up within the first few places on page one of Google for almost every item, and the photos came up well, too. Many people found the store through the photo links. That just isn't so anymore, and I finally know why. I feel like a dinosaur learning about grass-fed vs. corn-fed beef. There are some technical things about how many keywords to use, which keywords, long-tailed or short-tailed, and where to put them (all requiring research for each product), but here's the thing that's bumming me out. I was thoroughly enjoying combining educational information and nice photos about real animals with the store animals, building something that I felt was valuable and was certainly fun for me. As it turns out, that's one of the things that's hurting our sales. 

Diluting information about stuffed animals, plastic animals, animal beaded keychains, and realistic animal painted pins with information about real animals doesn't cut it. (For example, Megalodon.) Reworking the pages will help. In the end, if we do everything right, helping to educate people about real animals and their conservation status, perhaps exciting someone to want to learn more, encouraging them to buy a plastic replica because they have learned something about the real animal, or just providing the opportunity to take home a better experience than simply purchasing a toy, the best we will achieve according to the experts is that this added enrichment "may not hurt us." Maybe things will look better to me once the sales improve, but today, yeah, I'm pretty bummed. Adding in the real animals and the real science has been a project of love and passion. And in a weird way, an aesthetic project as well. 

I understand what the search engines are looking for, but their algorithms have come up hard against my personal values. I am still more artist than businessperson, and I can see that this trait is hardwired in. Still, I'm making the mental adjustment today and moving forward with an Excel sheet that lists every page on the site. 

Soon I will be well enough to start working on real art projects again, and maybe this erstwhile aesthetic excursion won't matter so much to me. Or maybe it will.

Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys ~

"Different Drum"

My Web Page: Tapirback.com

Two Variations on a Seagull for my New Zazzle Store

I started a Zazzle store the other day. I have not put up a header or made the store look nice yet. I also don't have any illusions that it's going to take off fast, but if I post enough images over time, maybe it can help pay for my time to write books. After a learning curve I find that I can post about 100 products quickly with one image in about 20 minutes (after the image is already found and prepared, which can take some time). Of course, it's going to take additional tweaking and time to make some of the products look right. This is quite an improvement over the CaféPress store interface I used a few years ago. More on that later. Although people like one of the designs, it hasn't been that successful.

I had a lot of fun late one night tweaking a seagull photo into the pink Image at the top. I also did a version that is more square, the same shape as the yellow seagull below, but facing the other direction. I like the cropping on the top image, but a lot of the products do better with the square image. I now have products online using both of these images and a couple more which I will post later. I hope I can keep it fun long enough to make a difference :-) It was fun having an excuse to use filters.

My Web Page: Tapirback.com

Debbie's Watercolors

Watercolor by Debbie Loyd

This painting is not by me (I wish!). It's by my counselor and friend Debbie Loyd, whose work I just love. Very few artists get the drawing part down correctly and in a balanced way, and I like that as much as I like her colors and technique. I'm thrilled that she finally has her watercolors online :-)

My Web Page: Tapirback.com.

Posters from the Rock Club "The Bank" (Torrance, CA, 1968) in Last Hours of Online Auction

Photo copyright The HeART of Rock and Roll

Poster art by Robert A. Wilson

Six posters drawn by my first husband and tapir collaborator, Bob Wilson of Claremont, California (signature = the sign of the buffalo), are in their last hours at auction on The HeART of Rock and Roll. You'll have to type in the word "bank" in the search box at the top of the page. I've always liked the Moby Grape poster above with the drawing of the painting of Marat in the bathtub and the big, fat hippie lettering in the dark space above. Can you believe it? Some of the more famous posters are at $6,000.00 and $7,000.00 (not The Bank posters), but some of the others. This is a fun site to check out even if you're not bidding. P.S. The colors on the posters are vibrant and beautiful, not the washed-out colors you see in the photos.

This blog is sponsored by Tapir and Friends Animal Store.

About My Blogs, and Fun with Stats

From my Animal Photos blog (now merged)

Both of these pix have appeared on my other blogs, but today I combined two blogs and wanted to mention it. I wasn't enjoying the animal photos blog very much. I'm not sure if it's because 1) I don't have that many good animal photos, or 2) they felt like the needed to be integrated rather than separate, or 3) I was making it too boring and too much like work by feeling responsible for figuring out the species and linking it to good information, or 4) all of the above. Anyway, the animals seemed like they needed to be integrated with Tapirgal's Daily Image, so that's what I did. Blogs should either be fun or part of my job, and the animal one turned out to be neither, exactly.

From my Tapirgal's Daily Image blog

After messing around with individual transfers, I realized I could just export the whole animal pix blog and import it into Tapirgal's Daily. Wow! Too cool! And fast.

So now I have 8 blogs, and I'm considering starting two more. It's really not insane. OK, it is addicting, but not insane. Beyond the "different subjects" reason and the "search engine optimization (SEO) for business" reasons, it's just a fun way to work with photos and the occasional thought.

I don't know if the stats on Blogger are new or if I just found them, but I was astonished at the hits some of my blogs are getting. Here they are, the brief justification for their existence, and the number of hits they each got in August. In no particular order:

. My Personal Journal in Pictures: (The one you're reading.) A lot of pix, but not that personal. Although the name keeps changing, it's the same blog I started with: my first, and I consider it my "basic" blog. It's a long chronology and fun, but is never up to date, and never will be as long as I keep taking photos and have things to do besides sitting a the computer (868 hits in August, which is not bad considering I haven't worked on it lately, but it does have a lot of subjects).

. Tapirgal's Daily Image: A random image each day from my archives. Very satisfying for some reason (561 hits in August).

. On the Pavement: I realized I was taking a lot of photos of things we walk on every day. It turns out, it's fun to see them in one place (254 hits in August, pretty good for a new blog without much PR and an esoteric topic).

. Animal Art Along the Way: Fun, and long overdue. I realized I take pictures of animal art everywhere I go without really thinking about it (386 hits in August, still pretty new; many more than I expected from the few Facebook fans it has).

. Astoria, Oregon, Daily Photo: Just what it says. Part of the City Daily Photo family (4,253 hits in August, quite a surprise; even though there are 880 fans on Facebook as of today, this number was beyond expectations).

. Tapir and Friends Animal Store: The offical blog for the Tapir Preservation Fund's animal-themed online store (4,588 hits in August, another big surprise; this blog lies fallow a lot of the time, but Lee has been helping with daily posts lately, showing real animals and not just the toys and replicas I usually blog about).

. Tapir Preservation Fund (TPF): The official blog of the Tapir Preservation Fund (491 hits in August; this surprised me as being on the low side, but I have not done much with the blog in any consistent way; I intend to fix that now that I feel like I have more time and focus for it, and some other things have become organized).

. Hudson and Joy: A History in Letters: This is specifically for posting letters, documents and information found in an attic and a basement. I haven't done much besides setting up the format and posting a few letters. This will become a really interesting resource as time permits - hopefully soon (82 hits in August; actually, more than I expected).

And what are the two upcoming new blogs? Stay tuned :) One is about rainforest conservation and one is a fun thing about tapirs and travel.

This blog is sponsored by Tapir and Friends Animal Store.

"Among Papers #1"

Among Papers 1
by Sheryl Todd
Collage on Paper with Paint
August 14, 2010 ~ Astoria, Oregon

Peace of stories
With dust in the air
Through the glass
Witness to all you did
Perforated
Complex questions
You depart the day
All magnificent
In Piraeus
Or formal prayer
Along a jungle river
And
Out of the herd

(The poem is an experiment. I like the way it came out.)

This blog is sponsored by Tapir and Friends Animal Store.

Collage: Fighting the Box

This is the first collage I've done since maybe 2004. I'm still not letting it (whatever it is) go, or letting it out, but at least I'm addressing that fact, finally. I used to do collages all the time, and they are good for my mental health and sense of self. After awhile, they get less intense - usually. I did them especially when I was anxious or tense. I often did three in a row. The first was either too controlled or all over the map. The second often had something to say that was readable, and was usually the one with any artistic merit (if any of them was going to have artistic merit). By the third one, I was usually over whatever it was, and there wasn't much left to transfer to the image.

Today I felt I was in none of those three categories, but I felt that whatever it was, the lid was still on; my inside was boiling. It was frightened to have the lid even be lifted with any chance of the content escaping. Partially, the lid was on because I don't know where to go with it. And, I'm censoring. And I'm doing that partly because I have enjoyed blogging photos and images, and I thought I might blog whatever came out. But this did not feel safe, and it felt like an imposition on anyone who might see it, but I also felt that I wanted to put it in blog format so I could see it that way and add some text. It feels journaled and more complete.

Making the collage felt good and bad. There's a reason I've been resisting. I was tense by the time it was done, but quite relaxed an hour later [and the typing didn't affect my hands badly as it usually does these days]. The image is more or less the same as many of my more emotional but less elucidating old collages, but there was something new and liberating in the visceral aspect today, maybe because I hadn't felt quite that in such a long time. I need to do this. Taking and posting photos may be more fun for people to look at, but it doesn't do much for the stuff that's locked up. Without the art side of it, just blogging photos probably helps keep the lid in place, because it makes me think I'm having a dialogue with the inside, when I'm barely whispering.

I wonder how much of fibromyalgia is trying to keep the inside stuff inside. That, for sure, is stressful.

I noticed that in today's collage there is no humor and no real place of safety. Many of my collages have those elements, so maybe they will come back over time.

This blog is sponsored by Tapir and Friends Animal Store.

Oct 17, Part 3 - Paris: Notre Dame and the Ile de la Cite

Yesterday afternoon the sun came out brilliantly for the first time on this trip, and this morning was the first time in a long time I'd seen a Paris morning in bright sunlight. It was gorgeous. As we walked from our hotel to the Seine (last post), I was enjoying the fall colors and bright light.

These photos are my few pictures of Notre Dame with alluringly blue skies.

We're crossing the Pont au Double from the left bank onto the island, and this is the gorgeous view you get of the south transept, the rose window, and the flying buttresses from that angle. The spire has some of the most interesting sculptures on it - mainly interesting to me just because of the blue-green color contrasted with the spire itself. Well, yes, and it's interesting to see these figures on the roof of the church.

It was such a nice day that the artists were out on the Pont au Double. I'm not usually interested in the caricaturists, like this one, but I do enjoy seeing really fine drawing. I have tended to think that even though this is Paris, most of the street art was by artists who were not so good, but this trip we saw many who were excellent. This guy was probably quite good for a caricaturist, but that's not my cup of tea. We saw some good portraitists at Montmartre.

This is where the Pont au Double intersects with the Parvis Notre Dame (the square in front of the cathedral). I like the arcs of cobblestone a lot. I also felt a kinship with the person trailing their luggage. Whenever possible, I like to make Notre Dame the first and last stop of my trip. Fortunately, we still had some days left to enjoy the city. It was still a novelty to see blue sky over the buildings of the Prefecture de Police in the background.

Passing in front of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, we came to a corner at Rue d'Arcole and Rue du Cloitre Notre Dame. I've always enjoyed the tile paintings that are part of this building. I like them better than the dime-a-dozen assembly-link prints being sold to tourists at the shop. It was hard to get pictures of the tilework today, though, because of the scaffolding. This image is on the Rue d'Arcole.

This one is around the corner on Rue du Cloitre Notre Dame. It's really, really too bad about the stupid graffiti.

In the warren of ancient streets to the north of Notre Dame, this is the Rue Colombe (named after doves) going to the left, and the Rue Chansoinesse ahead. We were making our way over to the Right Bank via some of these streets that are so easy to miss.

Go to Next Post

What do you get when you cross an artist and a geek?

I don't know, but I've spent some time writing about it on the gift shop blog tonight. I had fun working on the site and trying to improve it. Working with Les's beautiful pins didn't hurt, either. I love looking at them. I get a lot of creative pleasure from working on the site, solving various issues, making it more usable, nicer looking, easier to use. But I can also feel the call to paper and paint yelling at me. Paper, paint, pencils, whatever. I've been away from it for awhile. Also, in all the time I've been working on the web I have, for the most part, either "not found the time" or not been brave enough to post my own personal art (much). I think that's changing. Maybe I'll do some this weekend.

As with my photos, I'll probably pre-date any early art I post. I like chronology, and I wish Blogger would let you date a post earlier than 1970 - but it's not really Blogger's fault, it seems to be something built into the web. When they built the Internet's guts, they were projecting forward in time, not back. But the goal is to actually make some new art, too. I don't know why I fight it. It's easier to make blogs and web pages, probably because there's less of myself in them. I've put up a few "safe" things over the years. At the moment I'm thinking of a drawing of a goose, and there's some stuff in the Journey section. That being what it is (link to link to link), it's easier to get a look at the artwork here. Some of it I like a lot and some is just off balance. I'm not sure why I used it. These pages were fun - working with the colors and text. I think this one is nice. It even attempts to explain why I like making collages.

Working on two new Web sites

Yep! That's what I'm doing today. I'm working on a couple of Web sites, actually. I've put some new items on the animal pin site, which you can read more about on the gift shop blog if you're so inclined. I've also taken this basic format and am just starting to put together something I've been wanting to do for a number of years now - create a site just for our imported hand-crafted arts from Latin America. It's not up yet, but I'll keep you posted. You can see a few of the items on Tapir and Friends. I thought the cultural crafts from Latin America needed their own site for a number of reasons. We get them in small numbers, and it's just not cost-effective to put them on our existing site - i.e., it's so labor-intensive that they don't get posted. The new site makes it so much easier! Also, the crafts are not always easy to find in animal themes. There are so many wonderfully beautiful products made in Latin America that I wanted a place to show them where the theme is not limited. I'm hoping to launch the new site within the next couple of weeks. If you have thoughts about what you'd like to see, please send e-mail! In any event, the new site as well as the site for painted pins will benefit tapirs, because that's what we do here! Thanks for your support. Talk to you soon! ~ Sheryl

Wow!

I love these collages! Some are kinda sorta like ones I've made in the past (the better ones I've made, that is). Some are ones I wish I had made. Very few that I've seen on this site are collages I would not like to have made. Just one more project to look forward to. Well, mine don't quite look like this. I usually use a lot of paint along with the pictures. Someday I'll get mine out and scan them. Someday I'll make more. Meanwhile, it's back to work on tapirs, the tapir web site, posting some of my own pix online, Tapir and Friends Wildlife World Gift Shop and my new Market America venture. Much of it is linked from my home page at Tapirback.com. These collages are inspiring! Thank you!

Posts and plugs

A couple of days ago I started a blog about my father. It started with a post on the Tapir Preservation Fund blog about the sad and untimely death of Nico van Strien. You can read the post. While writing it, I began thinking of my father. My dad's birthday was a couple of weeks ago, and the anniversary of his death is coming soon. The one post led into the other thought, and then I wanted to make a blog in honor of my father. After his death, I intended to collect some material about his life and put it into notebooks for some of the family. I bought the notebooks, collected a couple of things, and got sidetracked. Then I moved. At the moment, I can't find the original collection of things. They aren't gone, they just haven't been found yet.

It's been a busy couple of years. It's time to find my other creative side again (the more personal art, writing, and synthesizing) and play with some of the less-work-related projects I enjoy. I can't really say non-work related, because for the past 11 years tapirs have been my work. They are still a passion and part of my fun, but I need to approach them again from another angle. Ideas are beginning to flow again. That's good.

Oh, and here are the plugs. One of the things I was thinking about was using CafePress for some of my art ideas (and for the tapirs). This came about after a discussion of using that site to sell tapir items for World Tapir Day. Anthony from Australia and Kendra from the US brought up the idea, I checked it out and liked what I saw - for myself as well as for the tapirs. So I was talking with my brother (Gary Todd), who was also needing to find an outlet in something besides work, and he put up a couple of products while I was still noodling around with research and thinking. I especially love his "Corporate Helpers" slogan. It's subtle. One of the jokes is, he IS from Corporate and he has been travelling to the satellite companies. But he gets it. He's got a few more, too, and I hope they sell. That would be fun. [Edited March 2, 2008: Another favorite is Buzzword Bingo. Follow the same link to his store.]

Belize: Day 2, Part 1 - Belize City

What a wonderful sight to wake up to on our first full day in Belize. This is the view from our upstairs room at the far end of one of the wings of the Radisson Fort George Hotel.

Both last night and this morning we noticed the birds gliding along the shoreline outside our hotel. You could hardly miss them. Not only were they big, but they had a sense of "otherness." "You are no longer at home," they seemed to say. They were exotic. Which is a little weird on the one hand, because of the two most prominent birds, one was a brown pelican. We have them in Oregon along the coast, and that's only 10 miles from where I live. The thing was, these were flying CLOSE. You could see more than faint shape. The more exotic bird was the frigate, found only in the tropics. The frigate bird above is from the NOAA web site. Actually, the bird in this photo looks less strange than they can appear. The forked tail is one aspect I remember, but the other is the pointed "elbows." It depends on the angle. Frigates are unique in a number of respects. (Much of the following info is paraphrased from Wikipedia.) Being sea birds, you'd think they might dive or swim, but they do neither. They don't have enough oil in their feathes to keep them afloat. They have a unique structure to their bones which allows them to glide on the warm updrafts over tropical oceans where they can signal changing weather patterns along the fronts. Besides being unable to swim, frigate birds cannot take off from a flat surface. Having the largest wingspan to body weight ratio of any bird, they are able to stay aloft for more than a week, landing only to roost or breed on trees or cliffs. They are light weight, and have the highest ratio of wing area to body mass, and the lowest wing loading of any bird.

This is again outside our hotel along a broad stretch of road that skirts the waterfront in Belize City.

Below is the beautiful currency of Belize, depicting local animals. Belizean artists often used these animals in their compositions, and we would see the tapir, toucan, and flowering plant together like this on many a piece of slate carved for tourists.

Drawing again and Palisade scenery

I've taken up drawing again after having done very little or nothing with it for years. It seems your eyes and your muscles start all over again, or almost all over again, after this long. It feels clumsy and it's frustrating, but I decided I wanted to see how good I could get before I get much older, since it's something I used to do pretty well. I began taking a class at the art center in Grand Junction.

It's all exercises at this point. The infamous gesture drawings. But truly, if you can learn to do them well, it will help a lot. If you ever wonder if gesture drawings have any point, find some by Rembrandt.

Peach trees and snow at the end of Milleman Street. This is looking approximately west toward Grand Mesa.

I suppose this would be southwest. There's Grand Mesa and some smaller hills.

Simple and small. The early days of TPF. The gift shop items are in the white cabinets. The rugs are from Salasaca, Ecuador, brought back by Craig Downer.

Getting back into painting

Today I photographed some of the arts and crafts I'd begun to pick up again. Above is a painting of Nietsche. It wasn't anything about him personally I wanted to paint, but I found a picture on a book cover in a magazine, and I thought the face was dynamic, so I got my old paint and brushes to see what came out of me. It's not a style I'd ever tried before. I wanted to use paint. I think that was my overriding feeling. I wanted to put paint on canvas. I wasn't sure what I wanted as far as the images, only the expression of feeling with paint, although I didn't want to do a complete abstract. I like recognizable images.

This is a bulletin board I had in the back bedroom, which I was turning into my art room. I had set up the canvas to photograph. For the painting, I'd taken an old frame, painted it black, and simply stapled some canvas onto the back of it. The blanket is just a backdrop for that. Above are pieces to a "watercolor quilt" I never finished. I love, love, LOVE the gradation of colors and pattern in this style of quilt. I'd found a book and was making my own design from the style. Here's a link I just found online to someone's water color quilt gallery (not mine :) Also on the bulletin board are several framed tapir stamp prints that Kate had made and sent to me to put in the online tapir gift shop for Christmas ornaments. Kate was very generous and creative that way, and we had unusual ornaments for sale each year. In the center is a page from a calendar I liked. The entire calendar was made of Egyptian prints by David Roberts. I just love this guy's work!

In another experiment, I found a photo of a Russian Orthodox (?) church, and used that as a model for color, because I liked the shapes. In the end, I liked the colors a lot, but the composition didn't feel right for a finished work. Still, I was getting into it, not sure where I wanted to go. Decisions about art are some of the hardest, and don't let anyone tell you differently! There are so few "right" answers, and so many, MANY decisions to make. It can really cause a person to feel nuts and very unstable. You simply don't have the easy answers of 6 and 6 make 12, and you sign on this line and mail the form. Of course, I hate forms much more than I am confused by creative decisions, so I guess I was born to deal with the inscrutable (from Latin: in + scrutari = to search).

In this case, I drew out some Egyptian heads and decided to let things flow from there, using both an Egyptian-style print fabric and paint. I kind of like what happened, but it's clearly two different paintings, which I never resolved and never finished. Interestingly, it also came from two different images. Here is an image from a collage I made showing three ancient Egyptian faces.

Here's the art room in it's current incarnation. I wrote more about it in an earlier post.

Tapir/Art room, Palisade

All of the rooms had incarnations. This was near the end of my time in Palisade, and I'd started trying to paint again, to find myself with the medium. On the canvas with the tapirs, I'd painted everything except for the tapirs, and as of this writing (2008), I haven't finished it. The painting on the filing cabinets is from the 1980s. It's a detail - a big blow-up of some weeds alongside a road taken from a 19th Century line engraving and painted with a brush in pastel shading. I always liked it, and never painted anything else remotely similar. Taped on the wall is a xeroxed enlargement of a photo Stefan Seitz took of a baby Malayan tapir. I thought I might paint it someday or design it into a t-shirt. Two real tapir skulls sit on the filing cabinet along with the turpentine can (with Mona Lisa's picture on it), and the green blanket is a color I like. I still have it. Also on the filing cabinet is a black figure. I hope I have another photo somewhere. It's a fertility goddess or something like that; a big woman riding on a real deer skull. Marco bought it in the Philippines. It stayed with him in Colorado. The folded paper behind the turp can is a simple collage I made by gluing some picture on top of another; I don't remember the image exactly, but it almost came to mind. I had it around for quite awhile. The easel is a beautiful artwork in itself that Marco gave me and I still have. It folds up and you can carry it with your paint things inside. It's very clever and very heavy, too. The basket under the easel is one I still use as a trash can (for clean trash). I got it in Los Angeles for not much money at a basket store. It's tall and fits nicely in corners and other unexpected places where no other trash can will fit. And, it looks artistic and classy. I've stitched the bottom into it again. I hope it never wears out. The small red wooden thing is a book rack. I think I got that with Robin, and I think we got two of them. It was inexpensive, under two dollars, I think. And I always loved it, especially the color. The canvas(es) propped against the filing cabinet seem to be three that I hinged together to form a triptych, but then never used. There are a lot of memories in this little corner, but I also like the arrangement for what it is and how it looks. It was a simpler time, too. The file cabinets had tapir info and personal files. I've brought them to Oregon with me also. And, they've expanded. I thought this was going to be a quick and simple post!

July: Gray Collage with Fish

The bit of photo in the upper right is a picture I took and printed in Santa Barbara at Sanctuary House. I'd found some shark cartelage on the beach that day. It was huge - maybe 15 or 20 feet long. Someone said it could have been a nurse shark or basking shark. Thee was also a lot of kelp nearby. I was fascinated with shapes of the shark, so unusual, because they're rarely seen on land. The wide blob of paint to the left of the hand feeding the skull is silver, and looks better in real life. I feel like I did this one on the floor in the upstairs apartment on West Valerio (?) Street. Dates and locations will probably come together as I post more artwork. (This is the beginning of what I hope will turn out to be quite a bit of archiving paper onto the blog.)

(Dated July 1986 / Posted September 7, 2009)

"Outer Garments"

Outer Garments

by Sheryl Todd

Collage on Paper with Paint

February 7, 1983 ~ Corona, California

This blog is sponsored by Tapir and Friends Animal Store.

"Zebra Arcade"

Zebra Arcade
by Sheryl Todd
Collage on Paper with Paint
September 17, 1979 ~ Los Angeles

Andy always like this collage and connected it with the a band some of his friends were in called Zoo Drive. (Joan Rivers got the name of the band wrong, it's "Zoo Drive," not "Magritte.") It's not a great clip. Here's lead singer Paul Delph in a much better video of "Down Here on Earth." Just today (June 15, 2010) Andy made a prototype from the collage for, hopefully, a CD cover. Hopefully there will be a chance to put an album of retrospective material together. You can see what Andy did with it here.

I remember Paul Delph and several other members of the band standing in my kitchen on Durango Avenue. Paul was in blue overalls and was talking about Zoo Drive. He was a great friend of Andy's and a cool guy. So I hope this project goes - for Andy's sake, Paul's memory, and not just because I might get my zebra on the cover. Here's the site that Andy made for Paul. If you want to listen to one song, I suggest, "A God that Can Dance."

This blog is sponsored by Tapir and Friends Animal Store.

Aug 5, San Francisco: Untitled Collage (Escaping from a Precarious Structure, or: Leaping into Fear)

I believe I had a nightmare or very scary dream, and began with those feelings when I made this. I was with Bruce at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, where he'd gone for a convention. The hotel was wonderful, but I was having a bout of panic attacks, and I didn't go out much. I'd taken my box of collage materials, and I made a number of them on the trip. This is the original of this particular design. Later I enlarged the pieces and made one that I framed. I think it won a prize at an art event in Santa Monica. I'm sure it did. I didn't like it as much as a number of the other things I submitted. Now I remember, the collage shared second place in Mixed Media with Megan Rice's sculpture, and that's how we met.

Back to the collage. Briefly, it certainly reflects the panic involved in leaping from one insecure position into another. Caught between them. The structure must have been awful, as nice as the top of it looks, because the face in the green is very scary. The person on the horse may not be too safe leaving, but the bird is. It's the "safe place." Most of my collages have a safe place somewhere. The underpinning of the house is interesting in that it's ancient. Ancient ruins, upended, out of whack. Even the pillar, the support, is made of water.

(Scanned and posted September 7, 2009)