I finished this piece a few days ago and have been thinking about and working on it on and off for almost 2 years.

 

This is the latest piece for my 50th Birthday fundraiser now postponed to September which will benefit The Virtue Center in Norman and ReMerge in Oklahoma City.

 

The piece is inspired by and in honor of a wonderful friend who shall remain anonymous here but who in just a few short years has become one of my closest friends. He is a constant source of inspiration and is always pushing me creatively. I am so very grateful for and inspired by him every day.

 

One day over breakfast at Neiborhood Jam we were discussing books and he shared that he loved the book Fahrenheit 451. The piece is made from the pages of the book with the spines of old books from an antique shop in Guthrie.  From the beginning I knew that simply implying fire in the background wasn’t going to be nearly enough to tell the story and so the books and the pages needed to be burned.

 

Thank you to my friend for being such a wonderful and inspiring friend and for making me revisit this book and for not letting me be “the great sloth” as mentioned in the book. I can’t imagine a world without books and all of the wonders and adventures that they hold.

 

So, I’ll leave you with this one magical quote from the book.

 

“‘Stuff your eyes with wonder,’ he said, ‘live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic that any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that,’ he said, ‘shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.'”