Baba Yaga is a Slavic witch who lives in a chicken footed house. She is found in fairy tales from Bulgaria, the Balkans, the Czech Republic, Poland, Russia, Ukraine and other Eastern European cultures. Unlike anglophone witches, Baba Yaga is capable of both good and bad actions. In many stories she can transform back and forth between young and old. She inspires me and I paint her house in different exotic venues inspired by nature from around the world.

Stories, like chicken footed houses, travel fast. One Baba Yaga house hides in a rhododendron forest on the Sandakphu trek near Darjeeling. Another sits in a banyan forest on the island of Guam. A third stands in plain sight on a clearcut hillside in Sourthern, Oregon- a poignant, defiant testament to magic and humans’ insatiable desire for lumber. How did Baba Yaga manage to evade the eyes of the loggers? Or do loggers know her secrets, and guard her truths from the suburban families that buy new homes?

I developed these pictures to help teach English. I taught English online to kids for over two years as a job. Most of the kids lived in Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Middle East like Turkey. A few were from India, Japan, Korea, and Russia.

I also teach refugee kids who live in my state. I use small cardboard cutouts of these images as props.

I found that food is a great equalizer because we all eat and everyone has likes and dislikes. It is also a fun way to get to know about different cultures.

From Football Sunday for families that don’t like football to Easter trees, everyone celebrates something somehow. For me, moss filled, covid winters in the Pacific Northwest became a mandala. A fox happens upon a fairy family celebrating some kind of winter holiday. A rat watches longingly. Some hedgehogs make a snowhog in the forest. A cat biking race goes on, with no clear winner…yet.

I made this scrapbook to remember Jasmine’s fifth birthday party. Jasmine loves singing right now. She wanted to sing happy birthday so many times that she forgot to eat the first slice of birthday cake. All the other kittens waited so patiently, but I do worry that some of her friends thought she was a little bit spoiled. Maybe we can find a kitten choir so she can sing more with other kittens. That way her sister won’t be so annoyed with her. Katie didn’t like the singing.

When I first got interested in children’s illustrations I didn’t like the idea of character driven books. Now I understand the market necessity for them, so I am trying to get better at making characters.

Postcards from lightly imagined places and somewhat imperfect memories. Stickers for the disheartened. All passed onto you by a slightly unreliable narrator.

From lovers and philosophers to parents and nuns the idea of love captivates and motivates us all. Prophets and fools speak of love often, tyrants use love to justify their ends. Hollywood and Bollywood make millions every year, selling love. In Greek mythology, Helen of Troy was the “face that launched 1,000 ships,” her kidnapping started the Trojan War.

Love and hearts are a common motif in children’s books, on cards and in children’s drawings. So much so that we start to lose interest. What was passion becomes business.

The original idea of love often gets lost with the business of the day, the fatigue of the parent whose kids are fighting. Love at first sight turns into tedium of small disagreements, work to which the couples counselor tells both parties to independently and jointly commit. 

So ultimately in this maze of adulting, what is love?

 Duty? Lust?  Pent up anger, waiting to be released?

I have heard people say that love and hate have much in common because they both inspire deep emotions. 

 “Love is an attitude with no clear objective,” the philosopher Irving Singer once wrote. He also wrote a three volume treatise trying to define love, both philosophically and historically, it is called The Nature of Love. It can be purchased from MIT Press for $140 (excluding taxes). 

Love is something that has been written about since humans could write. As far back as Gilgamesh (written in approximately 2100 BCE), there were stories of heroes and lovers, questing after fame and respect. The abbess and philosopher Heloise lived around 1100 C.E. and wrote “Riches and pomp are not the charm of love.” So too, these hearts that might seem trite and rough are not so simple. The perfect illustrations with toothy smiles and harmonious hugging siblings probably better express the demands of the market, but the kind of art I am interested in selling communicates the imperfections of love, the compromises and the anguish of love when it fails. 

In the last picture, the authority beast cries because she failed to protect those she loves. I drew it during the covid lock down in spring of 2020.

This represents a sampling of a long term project I am working. I plan to self-publish it someday. It consists of short poems in the public domain about different animals. Every letter in the English alphabet is represented, with a few letters repeating. All the poems are in the public domain. I selected many from antique children’s books I found on Project Gutenberg. Many are poems by women, who even in the 1800s were often writing books and poems for children. Some authors like Edith Brown Kirkland were difficult to find much information on. Others writers like William Blake are well known and much loved. William Blake’s wife, Catherine, helped him colorize many of his engravings. She was an artist in her own right, working as a printmaker even after William’s death. She also kept the couple’s finances in order.

As a lover of history, it is just as important for me to celebrate women from history as it is to support the women du jour.

There’s an old adage I heard when I was in high school and I worked in a nursing home,

“ The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Once upon a time we had fat cats that worked on Wall Street. Now we have lean cats that run through the subway during rush hour and listen to podcasts on their way to work. They still work on Wall Street. They are the movers and the shakers.

In 1939, the poet W.H. Auden wrote,

The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work…”

The commuter cats have their jargon words- derivatives, hedge funds, P/E ratios, EBITDA, cash flow positive, liquidity, purple unicorns, bankers’ bonuses, free trade, fair trade, personal mission statements…and other gibberishes.

Once upon a time we had Joe and Jane Schmos who worked like dogs to bring home the bacon and put food on the table.  The dogs were, and are consumers, buying things at big box stores, living in the suburbs. They strive to work 9 to 5 but they always go to bed dog tired.

Auden’s poem, “ September 1, 1939,” also represents the dogs.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home

The dogs too, have their jargons- backyard BBQs, church picnics, remodeling, DIY, school pick up times, diaper duty, stranger danger, mortgage rates, credit card points, financing, loan terms, the fading hope that every dog has it’s day….and other gibberishes.

The consumerist dogs were, and are, so proud to #represent!

Then there is the one dog that serves the other dogs. The lowliest of the low dogs. This dog, when she goes home uses language like lumpenproletariat. She reads books about revolutions. She, too, has her own jargon. Working class, means of production, bourgeoisie, anarchism, dialectical materialism. More invented language!….Yet, she also strives to speak honestly, without jargon…in plain English. This too, is not new.

The same Auden poem describes her. She is seeking truth. And honesty “All I have is a voice, To undo the folded lie.”

She tells her co-worker at the big box store how she wishes to do honest work for herself and how she found a wonderful poem, “September 1, 1939,” about the struggle of everyday life and how we are all caught in the cats’ world. The co-worker dog just rolls her eyes and says, “it’s all written in the Bible, ‘whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just…if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.’

Meanwhile, the true proletariat, the meek mice and rats eat the discarded food of the cats and dogs. They know the score and the class structure doesn’t change. They laugh at the the Biblical dog and her idealistic anarcho-Marxist co-worker. They do not speak in gibberish, but in silence. Auden wrote about them, “And no one exists alone, Hunger allows no choice, To the citizen or the police, We must love one another or die.”

The lean cats on Madison Avenue once used this last stanza in an ad for a candidate for the Presidency of the USA in 1964. The dogs voted for that candidate, and LBJ won. Lean cats continue to teach dogs about that brillant ad, the power of advertizing. The more things change, the more they stay the same.