NEED some JOY from art?--My wife Julie Schachter's 'Jumping Chollas' paintings may help...(in these Dastardly times!)!

https://www.etsy.com/listing/1868375643/jumping-cholla-set-original-quirky?click_key=2ba41917edd1fc91d2ca1844cd3664b435aa82eb%3A1868375643&click_sum=a5163961&ref=shop_home_active_7&frs=1

My dear Julie has been creating amazing art for over a half-century (see "THE ART OF JULIE SCHACHTER––50 Years of Sculptures, Paintings, and Drawings, 1972-2022.: An Important Undiscovered Woman Artist from California, Port Townsend, Washington, and Santa Fe.” and she has recently created a joyful series of these CHOLLAS artworks––jumping for JOY! So please check out her paintings as she launches her ETSY STORE, making her work available in high-quality scans, printed on premium archival paper for your enjoyment!

Here’s her Artist Statement: A Brief Introduction:

Welcome to my shop! The first works I am offering here (so far) were done after I moved from the lush, green West Coast of America to Northern New Mexico. The "slinky" cups in High Desert Tea were actually painted my last year in California, but I couldn't decide what the background should be. Once I arrived at my new high desert home, the background suggested itself.

High Desert Tea

I suppose the Jumping Chollas reflect the buoyancy I gained from my new southwest surroundings. Living in our rural area required walking down to a little village to pick up our mail every few days, and all along the side of the road grew old cholla cacti, thriving, though untended by anyone. The texture of the dead branches of these plants was irresistible to me.

I had great fun fashioning a few of them into my cholla man, which provided a model for the paintings in that series.

“Misaligned World” - Original surreal acrylic painting, with a nod to medieval Tree of Life tapestry.

Before I painted any of these pictures, in the years right after art school* I concentrated on pinhole photography. I enjoyed creating my own handmade cameras, sometimes using common objects to capture images of what they would "see" around them. Actually, it's a little ironic that I've gone from using lens-less cardboard camera obscuras to employing the most modern photographic technologies we have today. But, though I have a fondness for the dreamy, vintage look of pinhole pictures, I am very pleased that our modern digital cameras and giclee printers have made it possible for me to share my work with you.

Julie
*BFA from RISD, MFA from Mills College, Oakland

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Lesbian Lizards or Parthenogenic Spring and the Fall of Patriarchy

Soon after moving to northern New Mexico, I became acquainted with the whiptail lizard. These little darting reptiles (New Mexico's official state reptile) are ubiquitous around my home and garden - and all of them are females. The whiptail reproduces parthenogenetically, and this process of cloning itself is possibly facilitated by "going through the motions" with another female. While the whiptails in this drawing are protectively circling their female progeny to be, the oblivious (male) rattlesnakes - a lizard predator - are too busy attacking each other and themselves to notice. The circles containing the moon phases also mimic the human egg cell.

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