Some new art.

I'm a cat guy.  You can thank my cat Marty McFly for that.  He's a stud.  I like other cats too: tigers, lions, ocelots etc. I've got more into tigers recently because of the stuff I've read recently while researching some things about saber-toothed cats for a book I'm writing, but may never finish.  I discovered this theory that the sabre-toothed cat possibly went extinct because of people.  And I learned that tigers may go extinct in our lifetime.  This is saddest thing ever.  Why are they in trouble?  Stupid people obviously.  We have hunted them for all kinds of stupid reasons, for furs, fertility medicines which don't work and for our own entertainment, namely the circus.

Circuses have been enslaving all kinds of wild animals.  I started reading about that too on one of my internet crawls (which is like a beer crawl, but instead of going from bar to bar, I go from site to site fueled not by alcohol, but my own endless curiosity).  While exploring about the history of circuses I started noticing the old posters that were used to advertise for them.  I loved them.  The color, the pop.  I wanted one and I wanted one with a tiger.  You may ask, but Ped doesn't that glorify the problem?  Wouldn't having a poster celebrate the cruelty that we did and do to tigers?  Perhaps, but I'm looking at it differently.  I pursued an old circus poster as reminder of what we did in the past, that we actually are responsible for our actions and that we need to conserve the natural world and what's left of it. And cause like I said before, I like tigers.

There are lots and lots of reprint posters out there.  I wanted something original.  Well original posters are expensive.  I'm talking more than a hundred bucks.  I've seen some greater than a thousand.   This is because of rarity due to the fact that they were made on the cheap and not to last.  They were made for advertising purposes in which they were just glued to walls where they would sit for a few weeks until someone came along and glued another poster on top.  Think of the advertising you would see on the boards around construction sites in the city.  This is why they are printed on cheap crappy paper, like newsprint, so they do last that long.  Many collectors buy these posters and have them mounted to canvas where they can be treated a little more roughly.

I searched some shops in the city and some estate sales (my Sunday alone-time past-time).  But I couldn't find any that I both liked and could afford.  So where do you go for stuff on the cheap?  Ebay, duh.  After several months of searching, I came across an original poster from 1952 being sold by someone who was selling a circus collection of a collector who recently passed away.  The poster was cheaper than normal because it was misprinted.  A defect.  I like defects though because they remind me of the process of making the poster.  You don't think about the process when the poster is in good form.  So I bid and won it for pretty cheap.  Since I didn't spend that much on it, I decided to frame it up nice and grown-up like.  I've provided a picture.  It makes me happy.  I think about the process of making it and I think about tigers.  Isn't that the point of art? To make you think?  To make you happy?