If A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words....

I have to admit, I started this blog without entirely thinking through what I was going to write about.  I had a website (still do here) but I rarely if ever updated it because it's in portfolio format and I didn't find any fun in it.  If people really want to look at my art they can find it here and there and, well, right here of course. So for now I'll leave up that portfolio site but, chances are, once the domain expires in a few months, I'll probably just let it go.

In the meantime, though, I have this lovely blog, which I'm terribly excited about, but haven't yet figured out everything I'm going to post or how often.  So while I'm thinking on that, I figured I would share with you theaterclouds!  This is my favorite shop on Etsy (though I have yet to buy anything from it, I plan to snag a few prints next paycheck).

Elly Mackay, the proprietor of this shop, has some of the most original tactics for making art/photography I have ever seen.  She cuts out and paints little images of people and landscapes and put them in a wooden theater, lights them and photographs them.  What results is something like this--a dream, a fairytale, come to life:

It makes me think of Alice in Wonderland, selling seashells by the seashore, Oz (the hot-air balloon) and the ugly ducking all at once.  Here is one of my other favorites, which reminds me of C. S. Lewis's "Voyage of the Dawn Treader": 

Anyone who knows me knows I am an avid reader, but what I devour is mostly fantasy-- Neil Gaiman, Tad Williams-- but even more so, I have an insatiable love of children's literature: P. L. Traver's Mary Poppins, the Chronicles of Narnia, Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials, plus your Hans Christian Andersen, Grimm's fairy tales, and the list goes on.  

I think my enjoyment of Elly Mackay's striking imagery is that the thousand words each photograph reminds me of is yet another of those stories I love so much.