The Art of Marabelle

Mary, Mary Bellyache, thinks that ice cream's really great… eats one flavor, then one more, eats every flavor in the store. The poetry book "Munch" I had when I was little inspired me to this series of silly animals. I call the rhino and elephant my "large ladies". I also have a hippo and a few other Rubenesque creatures.

I'm afraid of the water. It's heavier than I am. And filled with unknown things swimming there under the surface, monsters of the id. And the ocean goes on and on and on, beyond landscapes filled with serpents and giant birds, mysterious bubbling pools, shadow people, moon hot air balloons, and bizarre floating green mountains speaking wisdom from the sky beneath spinning diamonds. A hawk is always following the sailboat at a distance, moving in tandem as a spirit separated from the body for a time.

My love of the absurd combined with a love of playful 1950s pinup girl art spawned this series of Dog Girls as pinup models. I had intended to make about twelve of them, for a full calendar spread, but they proved rather time-intensive. Especially their fur. I may do more of these in the future… and even more strange pinup girls… I'm visualizing a beauty pageant with unthinkable contestants.

A few submissions to a show at the outsider & folk art gallery The Attic Gallery. The theme was kitchens, and so I did a few collages that reminded me of my Grammy's little kitchen in the Mississippi Delta. There's a little story with each one.

I did a lot of different things for this show: collage on canvas, doll urns from The Temple of Shirley, and freakish animal and fairy dolls. The animal dolls were the most popular pieces, and flew off the gallery shelves to go and live mysterious lives of their own with new art owners.

A very fun show, and it was amusing to write for the backgrounds on each one, people stood around trying to make it all out and I recall hearing one person say in a daze that they were happy, but weird. I'll take that, because they are.

This was a group show at my old alma mater. All in all, I did eight of these fancy wood and canvas constructions, inspired by iconographic religious art. I put a lot of birds and bird people in my artwork, so I designed up a series of Bird Saints. The backgrounds are in Italian, and are more or less prayers based on the murmurings of secret feathered priests in faraway lands.

A very strange series of Insect Queens, spun out of a residual thread of a series of large sculptural pieces I once did that were inspired by songs by The Pixies and a sci-fi story about a human baby who traded places accidentally with a blue triangle baby from another dimension. I surmised that the huge bonelike cocoons were angels, or insects...

All in all, I did eight of these fancy wood and canvas constructions, inspired by iconographic religious art. I put a lot of birds and bird people in my artwork, so I designed up a series of Bird Saints. The backgrounds are in Italian, and are more or less prayers based on the murmurings of secret feathered priests in faraway lands.

A group show with a diverse and colorful collection of creatures, I enjoyed writing the background poems for these and obsessively collecting the ephemera I collaged together for them. I stained and burned the paper backgrounds like lost love letters. The poems on the Lesser Birds of Paradise are actually quite racy. The most popular piece has always been the Squid Baby.

I have so many older pieces from different series, the Dream Series, Still Lifes, Topiaries, Love, Mythos… and I had to toss in a collage of my mom with Jerry Garcia. A rumor started in her art classroom that when she was a hippie in San Francisco, she had one accidentally stolen Jerry Garcia's toaster. It was just like that game called "Telephone", where you whisper something to someone and on down the line, until the last person has to say what it was, but it's never right! The story was actually that it had been Janis Joplin's milk jugs, but I made the photo as joke to leave out to delight the students. My mom did not know, at the time, that it had been Janis Joplin's doorstep.