yay for inspirations!

how original: my kiddo inspires me. i am prepared to hear that the following is genius only a mother could see...but i'm going to share anyway because i haven't been able to stop giggling about this when i came across the following magazine doodles in an old design magazine the other day.

a favorite past-time of my biggest little is going through magazines with a sharpie and adding mustaches, devil horns, samurai swords or AK47s to various figures, or dismembering said figures with giant x'd out eyes and so on. it's not uncommon for me to come across drawn bullets and nuke explosions replacing the entire nytimes style magazine. or,
just a plain old plane bombing a highway of cars:

for the above violent image and all the others i won't post here, i blame society (but, of course!), general boyhood imagination, and most definitely over-exposure to a certain beloved friend's (you know who you are) ipad games.

but. two pages in that same design magazine later, and:

and:

is it just me, or are those little chair & house characters adorably inventive!? genius, clearly (says mom!)! but really, more than --or equal to-- falling in love with those little house/chair guys, i was loving the flexibility in the drastic change in imagery from one page to the next, and the ease with which that transition was made, and the sense of play in all of it.

i read an interview years ago on myartspace>blog with Holly Hughes,
a painter/printmaker and one of my former college painting professors.

one excerpt from the interview with her that i think of often is this:

"Our minds teem with encoded versions of all they have processed – and much of what others have as well. Painting allows access to that attic of the mind with great efficiency. Memories are structural trees hung with words and images, roots deep into the subconscious, back into history and gene pools. My fascination with potentially arbitrary juxtaposing acknowledges the results of the overwhelming quantity of information in our age and thus the certainty of incorrectness." (full interview here.)

random imagery, inspiration, mixing it all up: yes!!