Show & Tell: 10.2

 There are lots of books about psychedelic art, but a recent one called The Electrical Banana is a favorite of mine because it's one of the few who recognized Marijke Koger as being a monumental influence upon the style of the time. She was a founding member and creative director of the Dutch design collective known as The Fool, a group who made a huge splash in the British music scene in the late1960s. With Koger at the helm, they designed numerous album covers, worked with the Beatles to design and decorate their London Apple Boutique, designed and manufactured outrageous clothes for all the then-famous rock wives, painted murals and musical instruments for George Harrison and John Lennon, and somehow found time to record their own musical endeavors. Although much of the photography that documents these works makes Koger and her peers look as though they were leading opulent, affluent, and lavish lives, they worked extremely hard and for very little money. Koger in particular was extremely prolific at that time, and I think of her as being an unsung hero in the lexicon of psychedelic visual innovators. She admits to doing a fair amount of drugs in her youth and attributes the seemingly endless array of rainbows in her work to the effects of LSD. Although I don't feel a burning desire to experiment with hallucinogens, I would love to have a better understanding of the things that influenced her visual sensibility.  I also want desperately to raid her closet, but that's neither here nor there....

Chimera Cat

This is Venus, and she's what's known as a chimera cat. 

In her mother's uterus, this cat started out as a set of twins, and then the cells fused together to create a single animal with two entirely different genetic profiles. She's not a calico, with several fur patterns randomly appearing in her fur, but her face is literally split straight down the middle, one green eye, one blue. She is, in essence, her own fraternal twin.

A Chimera is a mythological beast, a mish-mash of several different animals. Obviously, Venus is all cat, but I can understand how the term applies. I heard a veterinarian once say that Mother Nature doesn't like straight lines, but apparently that's not always the case.

Show & Tell 10.0: Universal Inspiration

I spent 2 hours looking at this on Wednesday instead of finishing my draft on time:

Scale Of The Universe 2

This is a to-scale representation of of items in the universe, ranging from sub-atomic particles, to the estimated size of the universe.

When I feel overwhelmed by life, this helps put things in perspective.