Jana's Blog

Everyone knows about , Green Eggs and Ham, The Lorax, and Horton Hears a Who!, but not everyone knows about the Secret Art of Dr. Seuss and his ‘creepy-cute’ collection of unorthodox taxidermy. It’s pretty bizarre, I’ll admit, but its also pretty damn incredible.

We first discovered this ’secret world’ on a trip to California last year. It was innocent enough, Peter and I found ourselves wandering in and out of galleries, not seeing anything overly striking and quite frankly not even really looking, and the it happened. There it was. Dr. Seuss’s Secret Art. I’ve included a link to the website in this post (just click on Secret Art of Dr. Seuss above), but in a nutshell this collection of art was never released during Ted Geisel’s lifetime. Six years after his death, his wife made the collection of this Secret Art available, and I for one thank her. But mostly, thank him.

Peter and I fell in love with this one particular piece, Fooling Noone. Not only is it just beautiful, its powerful. The intent behind this piece is that no matter what we do or how we act, we are who we are and you’re fooling noone when you  try to convince yourself or anyone else that your someone different. Peter and I pondered this over our week in California and it resonated so strongly for us, we just couldn’t stop thinking about it. Note the nuclear eyes on the lion mask that the meek little bird has on display. Even the lion, despite his nuclear eyes, looks far from intimidating and the little bird is nothing more than hopeful. Its just such a beautiful piece.

I love this portrait and look at it frequently. I wish I could relieve the lion of his duty and tell the little bird she’s just fine exactly how she is.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 7th, 2009 at 8:46 am and is filed under Art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.