The Cicadas Are Coming, the Cicadas Are Coming!

We are about to be beset by bugs. A lot of things bug me but these bugs are brutal beasts, screaming day and night after rising from the earth like made up extras in a day of the dead Hollywood film.

Cicadas

Every 17 years, give or take a few, swarms of extraordinarily ugly bugs search for mates, make babies and die. For about six weeks the males make a clicking sound and when billions of them click together, there is a clicking, hissing, screeching, screaming noise that travels in overwhelming waves throughout many of North Carolina’s forests, blocking out all other sounds. No outdoor concerts, or barbecues, or pool parties. Did you ever try to scoop a billion bugs out of a pool?

The birds do their level best but they can’t eat them all, so dead cicadas are all over the place. On our houses, cars, driveways, streets, and our heads. A monster-mess of ugly bugs on steroids.

Basic Beetle

Bugs are in everyday language. Bug out, bug off, you bug me, we’ve been bugged, they’ve got bugs, you’ve got bugs, (what’s worse I’ve got bugs), sbuggetti, bugaroni, may the bug be with you.

Beetles! Now there’s a colorful bunch o’ bugs for you. Like little, hard shell painter’s palettes with six legs and an appetite for nature’s unwary little creatures. If you sit on them, they become butt biting bugs.

Stag Beetle

As long as I’m talking about bugs, let me tell you what is really bugging me. I am bugged by bozos with the authority to damage education in the lower grades from kindergarten to the eighth grade. Eliminate art and music from the mix, they say; they’re just a waste of time that could be spent larnin their sums. But be sure to keep the sports programs. Sure, sports are as important as art and music, but not more important.

Everyone should be athletic for life, but a very small percent of the population become professional athletes. However, comma, there are millions of designers in every occupation. Graphic designers, industrial designers, fashion designers, auto designers, interior designers, electronic designers, toy designers, game designers…I don’t have room to list them all, there are hundreds. The point is, little leagues in every sport are necessary, and eliminating art and music is killing the little league of art, design and music.

Lady Bugs changing spot colors

By the time students enter high school, it is too late for the basics of the arts. They are interested in other things, including the other sex, and have no experience of the arts to help them decide whether to enter the profession. I can’t name one thing that is designed, manufactured, marketed, advertised and sold to those bozos, who are not aware that every thing they see, wear, drive, live in, and enjoy, has been given its form by the hand of a professional artist.

If all of the designers in every occupation would join together, they would be the biggest political pressure group in the country, hell, in the whole damn world. We probably couldn’t run the country but we could sure design it.

Thanks for visiting me…

leo

The Weaverville Art Safari open studios tour is upon us again, April 27 & 28th.
For information, visit the web site.

Stag Beetle 18×30″ unframed $1200
Basic Beetle 15×24″ unframed $900

Penguins

Dear Reader,

For many years I have done creative workshops for children at schools, children’s museums and galleries. I like to think of children as young penguins facing challenges to their creativity. I wrote this little story in 1962 as a short animated film, which never saw the light of day.

Penguins Color Wheel

Young penguins have the potential for creativity if they are nurtured, loved, educated and exposed to new and different ideas. Given opportunities, in an open environment, they will express themselves in unique ways.

The young penguins say, “We’re all penguins and we’re the same in many ways, but we are also unique, peerless, matchless, novel, unprecedented, different, and creative individuals.”

The enemies of creativity and individualism are, many times, the young penguins’ parents, teachers, and peers. They can be opinionated, prejudiced and closed to anything that smacks of “being different.”

They want their young to be like them, to have the same ideas, and to adopt the mediocrity that much of society demands. Stay in the lines, don’t stand out, sit still, be quiet, be like the others, get a haircut, don’t slouch, stand up straight and, above all, be good little penguins. No tattoos.

Instead of being encouraged to be different, the young penguins hear, “What kind of a tree is that? Why isn’t it green? That’s a funny-looking house, and I’ve never seen a flower like that! Can’t you use proper colors? Make it look real. That’s ugly. Can’t you draw any better than that? See how the other penguins do it? Stay in the lines and color what we give you. And never, ever, make your own pictures!”

 “If you let me be me, I’ll be all that I can be,
I can paint pink apples on a blue tree.
I see a yellow and a green horse,
a red monkey, riding, of course.
I have my own visions to show.
Please say yes, don’t say no.”

Penguins will be penguins.
That’s all they want us to be.
To fly beneath the water
And never above the sea.”

A young penguin paints a beautiful butterfly on his white vest and flies off to join the seagulls soaring above the waves. The other young penguins paint all sorts of ideas on themselves, their friends, parents and teachers, who all swim, soar, or dance away together.

The preceding story and poetry about the young penguins is a little simple-minded, and sappy, but truer than many of us will admit.

The penguin color wheel goes from very slightly tinted hues (colors) to deep blue and black. It was mounted on white for maximum contrast.

Fantasies are free
Jump right in.
I am the colorman
Follow me!

Creativity is such a loaded term. If you’re working in a creative sphere and think that you’re creative, you probably aren’t, and if you say out loud that you’re creative, research in the subject says that you might be misleading yourself.  Only the culture can make the determination that what you do is unique, useful and therefore creative; otherwise, the term is irrelevant. I’ve never given it a thought as regards what I do. My philosophy is:

To be unique regularly,
Take a good creative daily.

Thanks for visiting me…

leo
leomonahan@tds.net

I am in the Weaverville Art Safari open studios tour this weekend.
Go to the website for information. www.weavervilleartsafari.com