Sheep Incognito Art By Conni Togel

Category: Sheep Incognito at Home

  • A Different Kind of Christmas

    Celebrating Christmas usually is my favorite time of the year – the lights, buying presents for loved ones, the food, the times together playing games, watching movies, doing puzzles, and laughing…

    This year, all that was toned wayyy down in our house – a sick mom is really no fun for anyone…I spent five days sick on the couch, with no energy to do much of anything. The kids were troopers, and very caring and condiserate – but I know they missed the hubbub and joyful atmosphere we usually have in the house…

    So the question is: fake it to make them happy, or just go with what is, and see it in contrast to the happier christmasses we’ve celebrated before and will be celebrating again?

    Never quite sure what the better approach is for that…the good part is, that I am slowly on the mend and gaining a bit of energy back. We are making the most of the few days during christmas break to do all the things we had planned for Christmas…

    And who knows, I might even get some painting done this coming week – it’s been a long while since I’ve had a chance to work in my studio.

    New Year’s Eve will be a marathon of Hobbitses, Dwarves, and Elves – can hardly wait…

  • A Beautiful Day

    It’s a Beautiful Day

    Today is the day.
    It has been a long time coming – a time wrought with fear, anxiety, discussions, screaming fights, and meltdowns. But, nonetheless, today has come.

    Today, we drive.

    On The Interstate (yes, this needed to be capitalized).

    My daughter has been dreading this event for quite a while – each day the necessity of learning to merge on and off the interstate has come up, there were long discussions and hurt feelings ensuing.

    A fear of doing things wrong – is that a teenager thing? A learned response from emotional abuse for much of her life? A self- inflicted horror idea now set firmly in her head?
    Whatever the cause, whatever the story – TODAY WE DRIVE.

    We have not discussed where we are going – she’s the driver, so we’ll go where she is going.
    (Hopefully all the destinations will include firm ground under the wheels, and a big void in front of the car…)

    When this is done, we will both have successfully ascended a Mount Everest for both of us. I think the view will be grand from up there….

  • When Sheep Leave the Fold

    One of the more difficult things about being an artist selling your own work, is the letting go process when a painting sells.

    Not only have you put your inner mind and thinking into a visual statement for everybody to see, but you also are srending that statement out into the world on its own, without hope of getting to revise it or even explain it.

    Of course, this makes artist very vulnerable – but it also is the one thing that makes art so intriguing, and it is what lets art critics earn a living: they get to come up with what they think the artist was intending to say out loud in his/her artwork.
    Which of course is, in very many cases, very largely guesswork and a big dose of speculation combined with imagination.

    Unless the artist has put his intentions and the mind behind the work into words somewhere, all one can go by is the visual statements the artist has made.

    This is why I find “the serious art worrld” so entertaining in many cases: who is to say, what was going through Piccasso’s mind when he decided to draw people out of proportion with really screwed up facial elements?
    Who says Pollock wasn’t just flinging paint at a canvas, just because it was a fun thing to do on a Thursday night?

    Hopefully someday there will be some art critics standing beside my “Haulin’ Ass” painting, trying to interpret it in some way other than it was intended – that is a tour in the museum I really would love to be on…

    It will be the perfect opportunity to play BS Bingo – mark off the words as the art critics and tour guides mention them; feel free to laugh loudly, as none of these were part of the statement I was making with “Haulin’ Ass”:

    “Social Influence”
    “Metaphor”
    “Subversive Political Commentary”
    “Artist’s Intentions”
    “Deeper Meaning”
    “Metaphysical Impact”
    Etc….

    Add more art world bs words liberally, and see how many you can find in the review and critics’s speaches…

    Don’t forget to yell BINGO! at the end….

    Too bad I won’t be around for that…the main reason dead artists are more famous than live artists, is that they shut up about what is being said about their work….

  • When Sheep Leave the Fold

    One of the more difficult things about being an artist selling your own work, is the letting go process when a painting sells.

    Not only have you put your inner mind and thinking into a visual statement for everybody to see, but you also are srending that statement out into the world on its own, without hope of getting to revise it or even explain it.

    Of course, this makes artist very vulnerable – but it also is the one thing that makes art so intriguing, and it is what lets art critics earn a living: they get to come up with what they think the artist was intending to say out loud in his/her artwork.
    Which of course is, in very many cases, very largely guesswork and a big dose of speculation combined with imagination.

    Unless the artist has put his intentions and the mind behind the work into words somewhere, all one can go by is the visual statements the artist has made.

    This is why I find “the serious art worrld” so entertaining in many cases: who is to say, what was going through Piccasso’s mind when he decided to draw people out of proportion with really screwed up facial elements?
    Who says Pollock wasn’t just flinging paint at a canvas, just because it was a fun thing to do on a Thursday night?

    Hopefully someday there will be some art critics standing beside my “Haulin’ Ass” painting, trying to interpret it in some way other than it was intended – that is a tour in the museum I really would love to be on…

    It will be the perfect opportunity to play BS Bingo – mark off the words as the art critics and tour guides mention them; feel free to laugh loudly, as none of these were part of the statement I was making with “Haulin’ Ass”:

    “Social Influence”
    “Metaphor”
    “Subversive Political Commentary”
    “Artist’s Intentions”
    “Deeper Meaning”
    “Metaphysical Impact”
    Etc….

    Add more art world bs words liberally, and see how many you can find in the review and critics’s speaches…

    Don’t forget to yell BINGO! at the end….

    Too bad I won’t be around for that…the main reason dead artists are more famous than live artists, is that they shut up about what is being said about their work….