Part 3 of 3 – “keeping your sense of wonder” – the ridiculous
As I explored the fields of antiques, collections and plain-ol’ junk this weekend at the Antiques Weekend in Round Top and Warrenton, I found a lot of things that bordered on the ridiculous.
I found this watercolor on a table of a tent that had been really picked over. I can’t imagine why this gem hadn’t been scooped up yet. But I have to say, it made me laugh. Kudos to the artist for making whatever the heck they wanted to. Looks like a painting done from a photograph of a heavily mulleted and moustached guy, clad in plaid in front of a sculpture of Jesus, which is itself in front of two other paintings, one of a western landscape and one of The King himself. (I imagine the challenge was to see how many clichés one could put into one small work of art). So now I have provided you with a iPhone photograph of a painting of a photograph of a sculpture, two paintings and a guy. And since you can see the reflection of my hands, I guess you could also call it a selfie.
There was a particular tent that gave me a lot of material for the topic of “ridiculousness”. The proprietor was quite a work of art herself. She seemed to have a strange obsession with doll parts, and tended to put doll heads on any vertical type of post she could find.
Although some of my friends on Instagram found this pretty disturbing, I was fascinated. I didn’t find it too scary, but I also didn’t look any of the dolls in the eye and just kept moving.
The same person also had a nice collection of random (mannequin) body parts, carelessly piled on the ground like an open grave.
So what does all of this mean?
As artists, we are often expected to visually make sense of this world. We make a lot of things that make sense only to us. Sometimes there are things that we can’t verbalize, but are still important to our art making process.
Sometimes things just don’t have to make sense. They just make us wonder!
We finally made it over to our 
fresh paint studio 