How My Brain Works

Due to reading too much Apartment Therapy and a bit of spring cleaning madness, I've been on an apartment improvement jag recently. Rather than set myself the task of fixing up my whole apartment, I figured a realistic target would be the very smallest room, the vestibule / mud-room / entryway.

I've got it pretty well organized and functional now, with a landing strip and a good shoe tray and a bench and some plants started. I've also fancied it up a bit, with a floating shelf made from some books I got in Cuba, a roman Hilaritas coin I picked up on the ebays, and such.

What with it looking so nice, I noticed that there was a big blank space above the window, and got to thinking that I could put some black-framed black and white images up ther

e. But what?

I cast my mind and my web browser around aimlessly for a while, and noticed that Dorthy "Cat & Girl" Gambrell was musing about maybe selling a Baba Yaga t-shirts. This got me thinking maybe I could do a cool silhouette image of a cartoony house with chicken legs, but there's a lot of problems with this idea.

Firstly and most obviously, only a fool would beckon the Baba Yaga in to his house. Number b, this could actually be beyond my artistic abilities. Nextly, there's not really a series of images in that idea, just one. Finally, it doesn't really mean much to me, as symbolism.

But this got me thinking about the mythic and the archetypical, and eventually led me down a deep wikipedia rabbit hole following the trail of The Trickster archetype, leaving me with three things.

1. A new life goal: to have my business card bare the title "Bricoleur"
2. A note pile with scraps like "necessary chaos" "Bugs Bunny, Charlie Chaplin" "made hard by the gods"
3. The idea that I could put up pictures of some of the animal trickster gods from different traditions.

After a lot of google image searching, I gave up on the idea of silhouettes, and decided woodcuts were the way to go. Bouncing around various image banks and amazon books of clip art and google image searches, I eventually stumbled upon this amazing resource. And therein did indeed find good suitable images. But how was I to indicate that these were meant to be representations of the incarnations of trickster gods, and not just a cute bunny-wunny? The answer to that, too was contained in the clip art bank.

After a bit of cut-and-paste work, here's my first attempt, Br'er Rabbit.