I’m not stuck in the past. I just revisit it in my heart with great constancy. I’m not a hopeless romantic. (I’m remarkably hopeful, in fact.) But yeah, I’m as squishy on the inside as they come. The upshot of living with this particular combo of symptoms is that I revert with incredible regularity to making very old-school, gooey, straight-up-rhyming poems on beyond-perennial–millennial?–themes. I fall back on making Pretty pictures and comfort-laden images. I’m very girly like that, very old-lady.

Just another bit of my naturally silly bent, don’t you know.

. . . so I let the treacle trickle . . .

Truth is, I don’t think niceness and sugariness are inherently awful. I know that there are a large contingent of folk, especially arty persons, that get one whiff of this kind of stuff and, well, immediately start to have a reverse-peristaltic episode. The very idea of brushing against the edge of soft-and-cuddly fills many hearts with repulsion. It certainly skates dangerously close to spitting in the face of serious art criticism. Ask John Singer Sargent and Norman Rockwell and, you know, anybody else whose technical prowess and ability to connect both with their clients (yikes! The dreaded commercial success!) and audiences (ewww, what’s with these guys making conventionally attractive artworks and the general populace falling all over themselves liking the stuff??).

And I have to confess to being an outspoken critic of some practitioners famed for precisely the kind of glutinous old-fashioned stuff that I happily turn around and perpetrate myself. The bottom line is not “I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like”–it’s just “I know what I like”, period. Because one fan’s treasure is another fan’s trash. When I’m producing creative work of any kind, if it isn’t for a specific commission–in which case, it is my desire as well as my contractual duty to produce something that pleases and meets the needs of the client as agreed upon for the occasion–then I’m doing what I feel like doing and can’t be much bothered with whether anybody else will be attracted to it. When I’m making gushy and flowery things, accolades and smooches from the art establishment is far, far from my otherwise cheerily occupied mind.

. . . so I just lie back in my cozy little hammock and indulge all of my candy-coated urges . . .

You may have noticed I have virtually no self-restraint; I’m so very not interested in being appropriate and meeting the Exacting Standards of those in the inner circle of the aforementioned establishment. Who, by the way, seem to me to feel a deep compulsion to Not Like stuff on principle if it emits the teensiest odeur of safeness and comfy likeability. Yeah, I’m that backward. There’s a healthy dose of the upstart pipsqueak in me. Nothing I like better than living my life in the shadow of the really important artists out there, secure in the knowledge that my obscurity gives me license to just do what I jolly well please and make photos and poems and stories and drawings and paintings that just give me personal entertainment and amusement and a very traditional sense of happiness. And then I pop up out of the shady tall grass and make a silly squirrelly smirk at the more elegant and impressive real world.

Here's laughing at you, kids . . .