A butterfly flapping its wings, according to Chaos Theory, can create a devastating tornado in a few weeks time.
Frida Kahlo boarding a specific bus in 1925 led to her changing the face of feminist art and becoming an icon that would impact women and female artists far into the future.
My ginger son suggesting to me as a joke that I should write a blog about bunny people led to me starting an art career.
We cast small stones into the ripples of time and watch events alter and grow ever larger.
Even though its roots dig deep into the most foul of soil, the lotus blooms beautifully, defying its beginnings.
Admittedly, I do have my doubts as to whether or not we can blame the butterfly for the devastation caused by a tornado, but if Frida Kahlo hadn't boarded that particular bus and suffered horrific injuries, she would have become a doctor. She would have changed hundreds, possibly thousands, of lives in a positive and transformational way, but she would have had no impact on the evolution of art in our lifetimes.
I was struggling creatively about ten years ago. The different streams of income I'd set up, selling jewelry on the internet, reselling vintage and designer clothes on ebay, were drying up. The platforms kept changing in ways that I couldn't compete with. More and more people were selling jewelry very similar to mine. The cost of inexpensive import clothes was negatively impacting my resell market.
I knew that I either needed to figure out a way to set myself apart doing the same things I'd been doing for the past ten years or I needed to start fresh and do something completely different.
When my son suggested writing a blog about bunny people, I took the idea and ran with it. I created a blog called "Project Bunny" and started photoshopping famous figures into rabbits and cats and dogs.
When the novelty of that began to wear thin, I stumbled across a blog called "The Three Muses" in which a group of digital artists challenged each other with new art themes every week. I began to realize the potential of digital art collage and what I could create.
I grew more confident with my burgeoning skills and tried pushing the envelope a little further every week. I stumbled across a reference to an artist marketing class at the local Art Council of Baton Rouge and by the time I finished the class, I was very much on way to becoming a self supporting artist. I'd found my new path.
New Orleans began life as a small muddy town port town on the Mississippi but over the decades and centuries, it transformed in amazing and fascinating ways, wearing the hat of the French and the Spanish, but finally assuming its present guise as an American city.
Again and again, New Orleans reinvents itself: bustling port town, birthplace of Jazz, party city at Carnival time, a phoenix rising from the mud of post Katrina reality.
As we envision a future for New Orleans, what do you think it may begin to look like? Will it build itself up like Venice? Will it protect itself with some futuristic dome? Or might it evolve in complete new and unexpected ways?
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