Odditerrarium

And other mental oddities

My morning sketchbook musings are often about how we use our brains.

For example we humans tend to manufacture expectations and assumptions about the world and then, too often, we see only what we expect to see. So in my sketchbook drawing I tried to think of the most unexpected thing I could imagine.

Another morning I thought of how expectations can lead to cynicism.

Another morning I thought about what it means to have an open mind.

The month of October there will be a one person exhibit of my fine art paintings at the Caplan Art Designs gallery titled “Odditerrarium”. The exhibit opens October 6th. In all of the artwork you'd see at the gallery I contemplate what our dogs and cats think about. Perhaps they're more sensible than humans? Or more practical? Or??? My exhibit idea began with this sketchbook page below.

I’ve created 20 paintings for the exhibit but to give you a flavor of what was going on in my mind as I created all of the paintings here's a video of me talking about 3 of them.

Because it's fun to do I've also created a coffee table book of some of my Odditerrarium series paintings and in the book I’ve arranged them so that the sequence of the artwork and what each pet is thinking becomes an amusing nonsense poem. https://www.blurb.com/b/11149506-odditerrarium Here are a few images of the Odditerrarium book pages.

I hope you have fun thoughts this week!