Inspiration

 A shot of Julia Levitina's studio

I was sitting at a coffee shop early yesterday AM with the fabulous and lovely Julia Levitina, and we were talking about sources of inspiration for the pieces we are currently working on...and while they varied greatly (my inspiration being Pet Sematary, crackheads, and those weird "With Love xoxo Philadelphia" ads, hers being a show she saw in Paris, poetry, and lyrics from a Josh Ritter song) we both realized that these weren't the things we were immediately thinking about when starting the pieces, but things that were tucked away in our subconscious somewhere, surfacing when we needed them to. Take my zombie cat for example...it was directly inspired by an outdoor cat who hangs out behind the house of the woman I cat sit for... Once I had the idea to sculpt him, I started thinking about how similar crackheads are to zombies (As a side note, we live in Kensington, where, unfortunately, crackheads are common passerby. And as someone who grew up in small town New Jersey, this was at first shocking. I've since (sort of) gotten used to them but they still freak me out a bit.) because they do that slow zombie amble down the street. I'm also regularly accosted by the "With Love xoxo Philadelphia" billboards, which market Philadelphia as a great place to come visit (which it is). They always makes me laugh because I am coming from North Philadelphia, where zombie crackheads and whatnot run rampant...So I'd already thought maybe I'd make a piece (or body of work...we'll see) about what happens in North Philadelphia. The zombie cat seemed to fit (since all my animals are representations of humans or experiences) so I got to work. At one point though I got stuck and was thinking that I needed better zombie cat reference, when I remembered Church, the cat from Pet Sematary, the original zombie cat...

 

A quick Google search brought up this image and I couldn't believe I hadn't thought of this reference before...I've probably seen this movie atleast 6 times, so of course it was in my brain somewhere, but it took weeks to surface. Anyway, all this rambling is to say that sometimes inspiration comes from the strangest places and sometimes it been with us for a while, just waiting for the right moment...