Veggiefus Tales

Here’s a little number I tossed off recently in the Caribbean...

This was a piece I had always wanted to do--basically a 3-D Veggie Tales-type piece. Strange, that when I finally got around to doing an illustration like this it involved exploiting the Amish.

Almost inevitably, every time we did a job in this agency to represent our county or region, it involved the Amish. Makes sense, considering that we ARE a tourist trap for that kind of thing. I’ll never understand people driving, flying, busing--what have you--hundreds of miles to see farmers plowing their fields and go to family restaurants to eat food that would give any normal sedentary, overweight American a coronary. Although...I love the beach, so I guess that when I visit there the locals ask themselves, "Why would anyone want to travel hundreds of miles to see the ocean and eat fresh seafood?" HA! Yeah, right! Sounds silly, doesn’t it? Makes it sound even sillier to visit farmland when you could go to the beach, hike in the mountains, see a Broadway show, etc.

Additional unspecified odds and ends, indeed.

[By the way, regarding exploitation of the "untainted, innocent, God-fearing" Amish--yeah, right! They're just as exploitive of the "English" as we are of them. Trust me. And innocent? Virtuous? I could tell you stories. Some of you have already heard them.]

Anyway, while art directing this job, I thought it would be a really cool idea to get four artists together and depict our county with four illustrations--preferably one for each season. I farmed it out to three other artists and did the final drawing myself--little Jakey Veggiefus!

The artists did great jobs. One did a train in the style of local artist Charles Demuth sans the homoerotic overtones; another created a wonderful farm scene with cut paper; the final did a colored pencil sketch of a farmer's market scene. All in all, a nice little combo. The finished piece really didn't do the art justice however. But that wasn't a problem. I had a vision greater than this simple ephemeral rack brochure. I was going be reponsible for an artist creation! Well, I suppose one fascinating aspect of this little endeavor was the feeling of being an art teacher and getting wonderful work from fellow artists, AND providing them a little piece of something nice for their respective portfolios. And a nice little story like mine, should they choose to tell it.

Did my artistic creation work?

Well, I asked each artist to draw at a specific size so I could save and mount the pieces together to put up in our hallways. You know...art.

They all came back in different sizes.

Artists. What are ya gonna do?