March is Coming in Like...a Gorilla!

Each end of February I hear the echo of my mother's voice wondering, "if March will come in like a lion or like a lamb".  In Illinois where I grew up, winters were often tenacious and March tended to come in like a lion often and like a lamb, rarely.  This old picture shows me bundled against the Illinois cold with my siblings as late as May!

My mother's notation on the photo back.

This past New Jersey winter has been as mild as if the whole flock had lambs at the same time, thus spawning wide speculation about a wicked spring coming along to balance things out.  On a rainy February day last week a friend sent me an email that came through my inbox like an invigorating March wind gust, "short notice: The Guerrilla Girls are going to make a presentation at Princeton University this evening.  Want to go?"

I've been a fan of the Guerrilla Girls, "the conscience of the art world", since I first heard of them.  Their attention-grabbing posters and billboards that illuminate the art world's inequities through creatively presented statistics and graphics have plastered many cities since 1985. The posters point out things like the shockingly low number of female artists and artists of color whose work is exhibited in major museum and gallery solo shows each year.  This number has barely budged since they first began their educational work 25 years ago!  This group of artist/scholars has done their research and found plenty of examples of stunningly talented artists in those overlooked groups, proving that the Western art world has operated all through it's history as a good old white boy's network, continuing that way even now.

Guerrilla Girl Frida Kahlo

Guerrilla Girl Kathe Kollwitz

These guerrilla artist/scholars have maintained their individual anonymity by wearing gorilla head masks whenever appearing in public.  The masks have powerful expressions, and like their individual wearers, each is different from the other.  "Frida Kahlo Guerrilla Girl" wore one that was fierce and fang-baring.  (Oddly, it's open-mouth sometimes seemed to express laughter,too.  Evidently, reading expressions correctly relies upon hearing the accompanying sounds.)  "Kathe Kollwitz Guerrilla Girl" wore one that expressed an old, wise, much calmer primate.  Wearing the guises, the artists  presentation was part slideshow and part performance art.  One can't help but get drawn into thinking about how they navigate the befores and afters of their events... When and where do they take off the guise?  Isn't it uncomfortable?  Both times I've seen them they were asked about the comfort aspect.  They admitted to being very hot under those masked hoods.  Art commitment often means suffering!  More importantly, they tried to make suggestions for "creating trouble", such as "leave notes enclosed in the pages of books", or "put sticker labels on items telling how they were produced"..."don't compete with each other but rather work collaboratively", or "don't take part in the gallery/museum system; find your own ways to get your work out there." In other words, when things are monumentally stacked against you, go guerrilla!

After all their talking about the art world needing to be inclusive of all kinds of artists, there was still the audience member who asked, "Do you have to be a lesbian to be a Guerrilla Girl?"  All of the heads in the audience turned to behold the person who asked this bizarre thing. Frida and Kathe's stunned expressions somehow showed through the masks at this dimwitted question.  They repeated to this proper-looking Princetonian woman their commitment to inclusiveness.  Another lesson:  you can't force a person to hear what you say if wind has never cleared the jabber out of their head!  

Well, the gust of Frida and Kathe did blow through my creative thinking and although March is still a a week away, it looks like this year March is well on its way to coming in like a gorilla!

Heat, Heart, and Art

Spring Bursts Through ©Ivia Sky Yavelow, 2012 

Today's post is about the combination of the words, "heat", "heart" and "art", or shall I write it as he[a(r)t] ?  That's a real nesting doll of words!   

Heat was on my mind today because the house lost heat last night due to a broken power line connection up at the street and it was COLD waking up this morning.  The ferocious winds have calmed down though, and all is well again in the house thanks to people who make their living in useful trades.  I am extra-appreciative of the warmth inside now and of their work. Heart was also on my mind today because I was going to post this follow-up with images of the completed hearts that my daughter and I painted for the Trenton fundraiser I wrote about in my last post. 

The letter "r" makes "heat" into "heart" and while "heat" contains the word "eat", "heart" contains the word "art".  This takes on additional meaning in the current context of my life, because my daughter is about to commit herself to an art major in college and we have been discussing the merits (and demerits) of paths chosen.  The appeal of being able to eat vs. being able to follow a passion, art.  Do you see?  This covers the nesting word HE[A(R)T].   

Below is my heart, Love That River! ©Joy Kreves, 2012

I'm not finished deeply appreciating people who have down-to-earth useful, put-the-food-on-the-table skills, but we do still have to hand it to artists for taking life beyond purely comfortable existence and into other realms such as the realm of passion or the realm of the sublime, or even the realm of psychic discomfort.  The arts light our hearts so we don't just exist with enough heat, but we are warmed with the exciting fire of acute awareness of these other realms.   

"Hear", also nested in that clump, might be a call to attention.  Economic woes are befalling Americans at an alarming rate and the arts are being cut all over the country, but I'm going to try to hear, to listen for what tidbits arise to increase my understanding of the richly complex relationship between desire and need, between passion and necessity.  It's a lot to sort out!


H[ea(r)t].  What do these nesting words mean to you?

Raggedy Ann's Heart

HE(ART) in progress, watercolor on unfinished wood. Photo ©JoyKreves

Raggedy Ann was thrust into my crib by my older sister, as she exclaimed, "JOY wants that Raggedy Ann doll!"  That doll had just been given to her, and she wanted nothing to do with it.  From my point of view, (perhaps a few years later), Raggedy couldn't help her bright red-colored, cotton yarn hair, her ugly red and white striped tights (I've never been fond of stripes), or her bright red triangle of a nose.  She looked pleasant and peppy, and I did my best to love Raggedy Ann in spite of her clownish appearance.  We had a sort of contract, due to her wearing a heart proclaiming her love for me on her chest.

Classic Raggedy Andy & Raggedy Ann dolls

Do children ever really choose such a doll for themselves or did Ann and her brother doll Andy, become "classics" because grandparents, enamored by the doll's cheery looks and positive message, kept giving them as gifts? I don't know if this is still the case, but at that time each Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy stuffed cloth doll had a red heart shape embroidered right onto their chest, hidden beneath their clothing, along with the words, "I Love You".  (In Raggedy lore this is often described as an actual candy heart.) I don't know if my sister had investigated the doll enough to find the heart, but if she had she might have felt an obligation to return the feeling, like I eventually did.  As the younger sister, I was to be the handy recipient of many hand-me-downs over the following years. Of course this meant I watched her gifts and clothing purchases carefully to see what I might be ending up with. I still hate to see things thrown away and have a hard time weeding out closets.  Somewhere, sometime that doll was discarded though and I don't remember the circumstances of her dismissal.

I think one has to be invested in material things to be an art-maker.  Many artists feel that a material has a sort of "soul" waiting to be released.  I know I've read that the famous woodworker George Nakashima felt that way, as did many renowned stone sculptors.  Many painters start a new work by putting a loose wash on the canvas and then picking out some forms to elaborate on.  There is a nice give and take in this way of working, between the artist's intentions and the material's personality.  That give and take flow is very satisfying.  From the array of possible expressions, there seems to be one most aligned with that canvas, that piece of wood, that stone.

Raggedy Ann's heart was all give.  Give, though, cries out for it's opposite, take.  In an ideal world the flow of give and take would be as equal and symmetrical as the form of that embroidered heart.  The first time I saw a photograph of a real human heart I was very confused!  The purplish, tubey thing did not resemble the graphic heart symbol at all!  I have disliked that boringly symmetrical and grotesquely oversimplified heart symbol ever since.  Encrusted with diamonds,  printed on silk, or cast in porcelain, the heart symbol has held no interest for me.  Which is exactly why I jumped at the chance to make something sale-able out of a wood heart cutout.

Bag full of new art supplies.

My daughter and I were checking out with our pile of art supply goodies at the new Jerry's Artarama on Route 1 in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, last week when the clerk showed us the heart he was painting in bold colors for a fundraiser for Trenton's "Hearts & Stars Annual Silent Auction".  He then invited us to participate by taking wooden hearts to turn into art.  This was a seemingly simple request, but for me it represented a chance to investigate the complexity of my attitudes and perhaps overcome the hurdle that the graphic heart shape has been for me.  "Know thine enemies" whether in the form of person or symbol!  

Actually, the classic heart symbol shape does exist in nature.  Shortly before my mother died I found a large "heart rock" near her house, and then a much smaller one as well.  I did show them to her and we both silently acknowledged their significance.  When I left her for the last time I carried those stones home on the plane and placed the large one in my backyard where I can see it from my kitchen window.  I gave the smaller one to my daughter, who was pretty young at the time.  My heart rock is a symbol of my mother's  presence, seemingly radiating "love" to me from under the tree.

My "mother's" heart rock.

I've discovered that there are lots of people who collect "heart rocks" and it's easy to find examples of those collections on the internet.  Most of the collectors seem thrilled to have found examples of the symbolic shape appearing in nature.  Because of the circumstances surrounding my first heart rock, it was distressing to me when I found another one last week in our back yard.  I laid it near the fence, not hidden but not on display, either.  From Raggedy Ann and Andy's embroidered red hearts to heart-shaped rocks, one agrees to hold meaning in symbols and objects.  I haven't agreed to a meaning for the new rock.  Thus fraught with complicated feelings I begin my journey with the unfinished wood heart.  Love.  Here's to a successful fundraiser!

Unfinished wood heart with fundraiser instructions.

Water, Not Pure or Simple

The northeastern USA is anything but a cultural or ecological desert. There are so many choices of things to attend: concerts, lectures, exhibitions or actions!  Because I was attending a splendid performance by The American Ballet Theater up at Bard College in beautiful, lush New York state, I missed author Coleman Barks' reading from his latest translation, RUMI: THE BIG RED BOOK, at the D & R Greenway Land Trust in Princeton, New Jersey in early November.  I did manage to get my hands on a copy of this beautiful book though, and in fact got a surprise signed copy because of the thoughtfulness of friends there.  And what a signature it is!  That gesture contains the attitude of the book!  Now that the Thanksgiving festivities are over and my life is settling back into a routine (I'm being hopeful here), I have finally begun to read this book that has sat invitingly on the coffee table since early November.

The introduction of RUMI: THE BIG RED BOOK has already filled me with inspiration. You who read my blog know that I am always interested in consciousness and matters of the brain, and also water, both as metaphor and physical substance. In trying to describe what it is like to "be inside a Rumi poem" Barks quotes Plotinus' metaphor for the predicament of human consciousness: a net thrown into the sea.

"We are the net.  Soul is the ocean we are in, but we cannot hold on to it.  We cannot own any part of what we swim within, the mystery we love so.  Yet the longing we feel is there because of soul.  To some degree we are what we are longing for.  Some part of the ocean swims inside the fish."

Just think about how true this is.  A few years ago I attended the traveling exhibition, "Bodies", when it was in Philadelphia.  This extensive display of systems of the human body (skeletal, muscular, nervous, respiratory, digestive, urinary, reproductive, endocrine, and circulatory) showed how fluid living humans are.  Our bodies are composed of structures to hold, regulate, or ferry fluids around. We are the water we consume, the water we bathe and swim in.

THE FALLS, ©Joy Kreves '11, ceramic & wood.

Our veins and arteries are simply other versions of our earth's creeks and rivers.  This is why I rejoiced with so many other people last Monday, when a vote on whether to allow more fracking of the Delaware River Basin was postponed.  There is no way someone from a gas drilling company is going to convince me that pouring extremely toxic chemicals into the ground to extract natural gas beneath the rocks is a "safe" procedure, no matter how many pro-fracking ads they run on TV, as they are doing now.  People can consume all sorts of unhealthy substances for awhile, but inevitably those toxic substances will contribute to a state of disease or death.  They will infiltrate tissues and veins and organs that haven't evolved to tolerate them.  The earth's body has limit's too.  What goes around comes around; you are what you eat; what goes in must come out...etc. 

Those are just common sense sayings if one stops to notice that humans are actually part of the environment and not just existing on or off of it.  If one mistakenly thinks that God planted humans on the earth to take and take and take, then one would just think of the earth's water as another thing to use up or make a profit from instead of something whose purity and availability needs to be protected.  Those who see profits from gas drilling operations do not worry that fracking chemicals have and will inevitably continue to cause pollution of our water supplies. Mistakes happen, leaks happen, and there is no correction for the damage.  We are the water.  In fact, The Associated Press already reported on March 11, 2008, that our already treated drinking water is FULL of pharmaceutical drugs.  Our water is not pure.  But it is there, for most of us in the northeast.


Perhaps you haven't heard that the earth has a water shortage now.  The more than 7 billion people now living on the earth are using up the finite supply.  Vast areas of the earth including parts of the USA are turning into deserts - - over decades, not over millenia.  Industries of varying kinds need water to create some product so they build plants near lakes, rivers and streams.  Because they "create jobs", nobody makes them clean up after themselves. The body of water gets polluted, and the people who rely on that water for drinking and washing get sick from the pollutants.  Some die.  This is why people who care about having water are fighting fracking in our Delaware River basin.  Landowners with lakes on their property may be presented with offers for that water by corporations in much the same way that gas companies are buying (or taking) the mineral rights from landowners who now live in areas where they want to frack.

Who owns the earth?  Who owns the water?  "Some part of the ocean swims inside the fish."  Who owns the ocean that swims inside the fish?  Well, guess what?  Corporations own that ocean!  It is a fact that corporations like Nestle, Coca-Cola, The World Bank and American water companies are buying up water rights around the the country and the world now, because they see the earth's water crisis as a money-making opportunity.  The time has already come for some populations that they only have the water they can afford to buy back from the corporation.  Until someone saw this business opportunity, water was considered a free natural resource that everyone had a right to, not just those who could afford it. 

This is why last year's exhibit of "Festival of Trees" at the Morven Museum in Princeton, New Jersey upset me.  The museum was filled with many Christmas trees, each decorated by some local organization.  Christmas is another PR opportunity for the corporations who know that water on and in our earth is already disappearing at an unsustainable rate. The D & R Greenway Land Trust's tree celebrated untamed acres saved from development and the multitude of wildlife that lives on those acres.  The American Water Company had a tree there also.  The American Water Company's Christmas tree was simply a propaganda tree done to create positive feelings about a corporations that actually buy up municipal water systems and sell it back to the cities at a higher price after "treatment".  According to Judy Keen in a USA Today 4/21/2010 article,

"American Water, which operates in 35 states, is discussing deals with 75 municipalities and other entities -- the most in at least four years, CEO Don Correll says."  "Selling or leasing water systems isn't always a good deal, says Wenonah Hauter of Food & Water, a non-profit group.  Some cities that do so are 'mortgaging their future' by ceding control of a vital asset, she says, and rates often climb."

I grew up not far from Pekin, Illinois, whose water system was sold to Illinois American, part of American Water, in 1982.  The city manager at that time since said "Selling a water system to a private company is 'a terrible, terrible mistake'".

The American Water Company Christmas tree was decorated with their logo on plastic water bottles!  How lovely!  How environmentally friendly!  How infuriating!  An advertisement for this year's Christmas tree exhibit at The Morven brought back those feelings, especially since I had just watched a video of Maude Barlow, Chair of the Council of Canadians and of Food and Water Watch, who will speak at The Institute For Advanced Study in Princeton this Wednesday, Nov. 30th on  "The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water.  As for the Morven's exhibit?  There are so many exhibits a fine museum could have, even around the Christmas theme. Why allow it to become a PR event for corporations?  Oh, ...perhaps the water company donates money to The Morven!  I forgot!  Art museums and entire exhibitions are bought up, too.

I think I'll go dive back into the inspirational waters of Rumi now to wash these toxic dealings out of my mind by reading verses of love.  Merry Christmas, Everyone!

Overcoming The Autumn of Distractions

"Autumn" is a smooth word that conjures up images of postcard trees and cool days, a season that slides into the cold, snowy calm of winter.   The other name for this season, "Fall", is sometimes more fitting.  In "Fall", the environment is closing down and shedding all non-essentials.  In "Fall" the earth is busy cleaning house. Those leaves that were needed for spring and summer are discarded by wind and fierce rain.  Of course, just like when one begins to clean out a closet, the result is piles and more piles.  I'm not even talking about raked leaf piles; the leaves in my neighborhood are shed in such gargantuan quantities that they pile themselves all over the ground in a thick, messy carpet.  I crackle loudly as I try to slip quietly out to the mailbox without my dog noticing.  I develop an intense craving for clarity and order.

Whirlwind, ©JoyKreves

 Every year September finds me inspired for innumerable house, social, and art projects.  I am reading at least 10 books at a time, daydreaming of happy gatherings, holidays and family celebrations to come.  Then, by early November, I start to feel as if turning all those daydreams into real plans would be a burdensome project I might not be up to.  As the leaves mount and get dragged into the house with every entrance by person or dog, I begin to feel that I've lost my handle on things.  Fall is just too messy, too full.  The flurry of dry leaves is actually a perfect metaphor for my state of mind.  I am convinced that one's mind, one's body, and one's environment are integrally related.

Homesick Brain, ©JoyKreves'11

Scattered around outside are leaves and fallen branches, but scattered in the dining room are notes with possible Thanksgiving recipes to make, birthdays to remember to acknowledge (GOD, I know a lot of Scorpios), and postcards for events to attend.  There are phone numbers for friends to visit post-surgeries, and in the bedroom, piles of out of season clothes to put away.  There are two piles being assembled for donation, and another for holiday gifts.  In my studio are new artworks that haven't found exhibits or homes yet, and pieces of others that need finishing.  There are plants that had to be brought in from the colder nights but which I really  have no room for.  Around November I realize that I have accomplished very little of my plans.  Sometimes, I just feel distracted!

I'm So Distracted Today, ©JoyKreves

Several art shows are the core around which all the other stuff swirls:
 
Currently, I have work at the ArtTimesTwo Gallery, in a four-person exhibit curated by artist Madelaine Shellaby, "Interior Design:  The Brain and Spine in Art", now on view by appointment (http://www.arttimestwo.com) through March 2012.  The gallery is at The Princeton Brain and Spine Care Institute, 731 Alexander Rd, suite 200, Princeton, NJ.

My sculpture "Beautiful Life" is in an exhibit at the picturesque Hunterdon Museum of Art, 7 Lower Center St., Clinton, NJ, through January 7, 2012.

The Beautiful Life, ©JoyKreves'10

In December I will have a number of pieces at The D&R Greenway Land Trust gallery's "Textures & Trails" exhibit curated by Diana Moore, including some of my jewelry.

Essence of Bluejay, ©JoyKreves '08

I am especially excited about the opportunity to exhibit "Transported" there, my new mixed media piece there that incorporates some of the paper I made in the workshop with Judy Toby this past summer. 

Transported, ©JoyKreves'11

In JANUARY I'll be delivering three pieces to The George Segal Gallery at Montclair State University, 1 Normal Ave., Montclair, New Jersey, for the juried "Art Connections 8" show.
I'm also excited about completing a new three dimensional waterfall painting, out of acrylic and watercolor on ceramic and wood.  I have too many other ideas cooking to keep track of.

You just cannot stop the onslaught of swirling leaves, and you cannot stop the myriad of exquisite activities and concerts beckoning your attention.  You must not stop your creative flow, either, even as you turn off those outside faucets for the winter.  You've got to keep creating, or at least refining, as the trees poke their newly bare twigs into the uncluttered air of late autumn.  You've got to get a handle on the coming winter.

Today I visited a friend with a great tale of mind/body connectedness.  A poet, she hadn't been able to write for a long time, due to her muse being blocked by pain.  She needed surgery, which she had a couple of days ago.  Well she wrote not one, but five poems while in the hospital!  Uncorked by the diminished pain, her muse flew back into action in spite of the less than inspiring hospital environment.  It was a wonderful thing for me to see her whole being rejoicing in the return of the creative spirit which is her core.  Now mid-November, my muse seems to be just starting to settle into sharper focus, where I hope she'll stay through the winter holidays and breaks, to give me a handle on the coming winter.  I'm reaching for her fingers in the clearing air of late autumn. 

After Art Grows Up and Leaves Home

Yogis and physicists talk about a deep level of reality that underlies everything we know consciously and unconsciously.  Our experiences, thoughts and actions exist only in the top skim of things, like the rings of rippling water after we skip a stone across its surface.  The process of making art sometimes brings artists nearer to that deeper realm.  I hope the process of viewing the art can bring the onlooker there also.

My poem "Lyrics for Electron Playground" is about existing in these levels of reality .  The poem is incorporated into an artwork, "Electron Playground". That artwork is now in Rider University's Permanent Collection, and is hanging in a new building on campus, North Hall.  Last week I went to see it there.  It is beautifully installed in a plexiglass wallbox at the end of a hallway: 

ELECTRON PLAYGROUND, ©JoyKREVES, 2010

LYRICS FOR

ELECTRON PLAYGROUND

Heart beats
Dog barks
Turtle dies

Tides pull
Leaves turn
Lightnings spark

Dreams are born where
electrons dance and
baby is the oldest brain alive

Time is now here
Time is nowhere
Time is now here

Heat rises
Cat awakens
Baby cries

Moons rise
Nudes descend
Poppies bud

Dreams thrive where
electrons bounce and
youth are the prophets of night

Time is nowhere
Time is now here
Time is nowhere

Hearts stop
Sirens wail
Oceans expire

Forests grieve
Rains drown
Air sours

Dreams collide where
electrons play and
sages gaze beneath the finish line

Time is now here
Time is nowhere
Time is now here

                      -Joy Kreves ‘10

I've been prejudiced in believing that artists and people involved with the humanities have a headstart on leading meaningful lives.  Apple's Steve Jobs' life was proof that, in fact, it is the ability to think creatively in any field that enables one to leave behind a trail of significant achievements. Being able to think creatively is the key, because it gives one a better chance of finding an access to the deepest plane of reality, that plane beyond conscious reach.  I am convinced that this is where real meaning resides and those who taste it are deeply enriched by the experience.

As I was looking at my ELECTRON PLAYGROUND piece in the hallway, a friend who teaches philosophy at Rider came by.  He was excited because his office is in this new building, just down the hall from my piece, and he wanted to show me that he had hung my DOUBLE-HEADED SPIRAL over his office desk.  He purchased that piece and another from the series several years ago, and they both hung in his home for awhile.  He then proceeded to tell me a story in which he was

DOUBLE-HEADED SPIRAL, ©JoyKREVES, private collection

the classic absent-minded professor.  A prankster friend had stayed at his house and re-hung every piece of his artwork upside down.  My professor friend never noticed until he brought DOUBLE-HEADED SPIRAL to the college, that the friend had also turned my spiral upside down!  Even then, it was the gallery director who helped him hang it, who noticed my upside down signature.  It's in a metal shadowbox frame, and the friend had actually unscrewed the hanging wire to reverse the piece.  My friend, lost in the world inside of his head, never noticed that DOUBLE-HEADED SPIRAL was now DOUBLE-FOOTED SPIRAL!  I console myself by remembering that any good artwork can "work" in any direction.  Or so they claim. Actually, the space depicted in the spirals is not tied to a horizon; it is a broader more universal "deep space" that includes notions of time and timelessness, as does ELECTRON PLAYGROUND, and I admit that I have also lost track of what was right-side-up for several of the pieces at certain points in time. 

Yesterday I attended the reception for the ABSTRACT SHOW at The Coryell Gallery in Lambertville where several of my friends are showing.  Once again I came away being very confused as to what really constitutes "abstract" art.  For me, there has never been a meaningful division between abstraction and realism.  It seems a work is considered "abstract" as soon as it departs from the depiction of "things" and ventures into a depiction of "space", but as we learn that space is jammed full and not empty at all, and as we are able to see this stuff quite tangibly with increasingly high powered technology, the term "abstraction" loses meaning.  Hopefully, through technology or meditation, many of us can dive down to that deep plane of omniscient awareness that seems to be the basis that unites everything as well as everynonthing, every potential thing.  In a utopian scenario of the future most of us would get in deeper touch with our creative selves and thus leave behind a truly significant trail in our wake.  Pondering a work of art, whether upside or down, can sometimes open the door to a world so much larger than ourselves. Time may not exist in the most abstract reality, but in our manifested everyday reality, the time is now.  Art grows up and moves away, but once comprehended, it's effect is never erased. Whether we turn it upside down or sideways, whether it is "abstract" or "realistic", it aids us in leading meaningful lives.  Awesome.

Can Dogs Appreciate Art?

Relatives of mine have had dogs who "sang" along with them, or their piano playing.  The dogs may have just had the instinct to join into a stand-in for a  canine chorus. My brother's German shepherd, however, would get started with help, but went onto more solo singing than I'd expect from pure instinctual behavior. 

Last night my dog reacted to a photograph, making me wonder if dogs can make sense of two dimensional images. If dogs can make sense of pictures, it follows that they might be able to appreciate art in some way.  Perhaps they are even capable of having an aesthetic experience. 

I had sat down on the old white sofa to look at a magazine.  Because it's the only piece of furniture my dog is allowed to come up on, he happily made his arthritic effort to join me there.  I leafed through page after page of creative advertisements as he relaxed beside me, but when I came to the double spread for Bulgari in which a bare model embraces  a fragrance bottle while cuddling up to a lion, he lifted his head and strained his nose towards the magazine, sniffing intently.  My dog continued his investigation until he satisfied himself that there was no living creature there wearing that fur.  Although the ad shows a fragrance bottle, there is no sample of it in the page, so he was not reacting to a smell.  He must have reacted to the image of fur or perhaps the lion's features.  I tested the theory by continuing to turn pages of photographs and watching him ignore me.  I stuck some other pages under his nose, which he simply ignored, but when I stuck the spread with the lion in his face again he sniffed it again, for a shorter time and with less interest than the first time before relaxing again with a sigh, as if saying,  "Oh yeah, that's that same nothing I checked out before." 

In an article in Cerebrum, from the Dana Foundation, "your gateway to information about the brain and brain research", authors Gisela Kaplan, Ph.D. and Lesley J. Rogers, D. Phil., D.Sc. say,
"Creation and appreciation of art are aspects of consciousness that we have tradition-ally viewed as purely human activities, ones that express our highest cognitive abilities. If animals share at least some aspects of this ability, we will have to look upon them with more respect and perhaps change the ways we treat them."
The authors go on to say that "some researchers have dared to suggest that animals may play because they find it pleasurable to do so. Doing something for pleasure, rather than for survival, is part of how we define the act of creating art."  They warn against forming any conclusions too soon, but I'll peak around that corner to see what may lie there.  Perhaps my dog has not only the ability to appreciate art, but the ability to create it! 

I've been amazed to watch my dog play creative games.  He has trained me to throw treats out the window.  Usually he runs right to it, settles down on a plush patch of grass, and begins to devour it.  Several times, though, although I'd thrown the treat with pretty good aim, landing it near him and certainly within his sight and smell range, I've seen him pretend not to see it.  This dog who has smelled a stale oreo cookie 15 ft. away, pretended that he just could not see or smell that fresh treat right under his nose!   After a few minutes of exhaustive "searching", he finally "discovered" it, joyfully tossing it in the air.  This was pure pretending, pure playing.  To create art it is necessary to engage in lots of pretending in order to create illusions of form and space.  Having the ability to pretend implies an ability to appreciate creative pretending, does it not?

The magazine lion incident reminded me of a Halloween some years ago.  When my daughter was a toddler (before we had our dog) she had a lion costume.  We later gave it to a friend who had two adorable little girls, and one Halloween they came trick-or-treating to our house, one wearing that costume and the other in a similar one.  Our dog did not know what to make of them.  He kept his distance and looked quizzicaly up to me, then barked a very questioning alert and looked back at me with the most confused expression ever.  The funny and adorable scene left such an impression on me that I spent several hours searching for the photograph before realizing that the image was only committed to my memory.

More funny incidents occur around Christmastime, when we walk our dog around the neighborhood.  Several people display sculptures of reindeer in their yards.  Our dog has slowed down to suspiciously eye those white cutout wooden deer, and he has actually charged at the willow branch ones.  This is slightly embarrassing to both of us.  You would hope your dog could tell the difference between reality and decoration!

I have not practiced showing my dog two-dimensional images so he could perhaps appreciate portraiture.  If he could "read" a photograph of fur or a lion's face to recognize it as resembling a real animal; if he could "read" a sculpture of a deer as the actual animal, perhaps he would enjoy a little portrait gallery at his own eye level.  Hmmm....