Lisa Frank

Today was a day of rest for us, pure and simple. We did make a trip out to see Dr. Williams at the chiropractor's office - Madison even had a Valentine's Day card made up for him.

As you can see, she spent a little time today making Valentine's Day cards for others. Daddy and Mommy helped, of course. She did enjoy coloring in some of the black velvet Lisa Frank cards, though she still has several more to make before the big day. It's good to start early though. Lots of cards to color in before next week!

This does spring to mind another recollection of Mommy and Daddy. We have always appreciated Lisa Frank, though perhaps not entirely for the reasons the younger crowd might. For Daddy, the style and artwork is like an overdose of sugar. It's shocking. It's hilarious. It's even scary. Where else can you find so many unicorns and rainbows? Or dancing teddy bears? Or puppies eating ice cream? Or happy polar bears?

There is this line where cute is. It is a border that we try not to cross, a perceived limitation to what cute should be. Yet the Lisa Frank style gleefully takes a bold step over that line - and keeps on skipping forward, pushing the very definition of cute towards that brightly colored undiscovered country.

As a happy example, this is the cover of one of Mommy's notebooks. Daddy may have purchased this one for her. We always get Mommy a Lisa Frank notebook. We try to get everyone something Lisa Frank from time to time, just for fun. One year, we even made for Aunt Shain a Lisa Frank themed Easter Basket. Obviously, it had notebooks and stickers in and on it, but we also went through the extra effort of painting it with fluorescent colors, placing it in a darkened room, and setting up a black light on it. The thing glowed in the dark! It was sheer artwork, I tell you! Some may call Lisa Frank graphics obnoxious or even nauseating. For those individuals, let me refer back to an earlier conversation concerning the the top floor of the High Museum: It is filled with canvases, filled with paint in random directions. As a former student of art, I can appreciate the textures and paints and so forth. But when it all comes down to it, what makes anything on that top floor art - and Lisa Frank not art? To establish my point, here below I am posting an image of the painting, "Para III," by Morris Louis. This is at the High Museum in Atlanta.

Okay. So there you go. A bunch of colors splatted on the canvas. Sure, there's design there somewhere. Green against red - contrasting, vibrant colors. Maybe some sort of Jamaican symbology with the coloring? How long do you think this took to paint - seriously? Okay, so this is accepted as "art." Fine. I'm okay with this.

NOW, compare it to THIS masterwork:

Which one of these pieces stirs up real emotion? Sure, the emotion from Lisa Frank might be terror for adults. Or, it could bring laughter at the saccharin-laced audacity. Or a sweet memory of happy times in a person's childhood. For many children, this is the sort of art that is genuinely appreciated. So there's your real emotion. Put that against "Para III." If given a choice between Morris Louis and Lisa Frank, let me be frank: the rainbows and unicorns rule.

In fact, we're hoping there's a Lisa Frank coffee table book someday, as that would be a perfect gift to go along with the "See Rock City" photo book we got as a gift a few years ago!

"To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it."

- Leo Tolstoy