Artists

Tonight we matted art prints again at Mari's house. I sat beside a mannequin of a child wearing an elaborate Mardi Gras headdress and enjoyed the witty interchange of four young artists, each intense projects going, all of which involve realistically rendered elements of the human body in surreal contexts.

I was regaled by an exhibition of Dave Normal's drawings, paintings and travelogues. He has recently returned from an immense river valley in Papua-New Guinea, where he delivered money for medical care to a tribal chief who had adopted an anthropologist friend of Dave's as his own son. In Dave's photographs of tribal ritual, Christian rites and images blend seamlessly with those of the rain forest tribes. In Dave's drawings, human and animal forms blend with abstract images in bizarre dream sequences. He is planning to build a twenty foot high pulsating musical anus for celebrants to walk through at the Burning Man Festival in the desert this Labor Day Weekend.

Beautiful Mari Kono is full of enthusiasm for her art students. She knows what my mother knew--genuine appreciation by an adult powerfully amplifies a child's natural creative expression. As I left, we hugged each other goodbye and simultaneously said, "You inspire me."