POETRY IS THE ART OF CREATING IMAGINARY GARDENS WITH REAL TOADS. -MARIANNE MOORE
Within the oeuvre of Shoosty’s (artist Stephen Shooster) many faceted work, Bugs represents a category of illustrations depicting fanciful insects. The fascination with both real and imaginary insects goes back at least as far as the sacred
In a fantasy, the key is not merely to write descriptive copy but to capture the whimsical mood of the art and to sustain the illusion that the world they create is real. The poet Marianne Moore once said Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads. That’s what we are doing here. Fantasy is an illusion. And illusion always has an aspect of reality to it that anchors the viewer/reader — something familiar to ease the way to the strange. Shoosty Bugs borrows the style of such text (the familiar) to present a strange but somehow plausible scenario. With Edward Lear on one shoulder and Lewis Carroll on the other, we dove fearlessly into the deep.
Jim Boring, Editor 1940-2024
scarabs of ancient Egypt. Shooster’s contributions to the genre are at the highest level of creativity and orig- inality. The anatomy of his creatures, while familiar, is more at home in Alice’s Wonderland than in Linnaeus’s taxonomy. The concept of creating a gallery of fantastic insects is in the tradition of art that insists on the participa- tion of the viewer. Both the artist and the viewer know that the bug in question does not exist in the real world, except that it does exist in the mind of the artist and of the viewer where it stimulates that most potent human attribute — imagination.
Jim Boring, Editor Shoosty Bugs®
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