Nobody Goes There Anymore. It's Too Crowded.~Yogi Berra

There are a lot of people in the world. Wherever I go, physically or virtually, I feel awash in a sea of people.  They're all real living people with pasts and futures.  They're swimming in the same ocean of time as me even if our paths never cross again. I hear snatches of their conversations and it's the tip of the iceberg of their reality.  According to the census bureau there's 6,814,200,000 people in the world (if you count the commas that's billions). The Population Density Globe is all prickly. 

When I venture out into the blogosphere I feel small. Speck-ish.  Quite intimidated, actually.

 There is  So. Much. Talent. out there.
I spend an hour surfing the web and come back with eyefuls. Mind full.

Where do people find these vast stores of imagination? How do they find the time and energy to pour themselves into art? I'm gobsmacked at the sheer amazingness out there! People are inventing away, building beautiful work-of-art web sites; stringing nouns and verbs and punctuation marks together all by themselves like there's no tomorrow; generating beauty out of the humblest of items. I don't remember people being this clever in school. Quite honestly, I was always the brilliant one. I'm a little taken aback to find the masses waving as they pass.

Here's a sampling of what an hour's worth of perusing garnered, and the thing is, if I go on the net tomorrow "just looking" I'll find a whole other lot of treasures.  I'm just skimming the surface - all the blogs I stopped to visit had their own lists of places to see, who had their lists of people to see, who had....ad infinitum.   You know, it actually took me longer to collect and catalogue these sites than to find them.

1. (a-b). Extraordinary book art "Words Create Worlds" by Kaspan for Anagram Books

2. (a-d)The incredible reverse Trompe d'oeil painting of Alexa Meade These are not paintings pretending to be people; it's the opposite.

3. (a-d) Intricate cuttings of Peter Callesen I particularly like the fact that  "Transparent God" is composed of human cut outs.  (see detail)

4.  Lovely resin jewellry by Liz Hutnick  ( so beautiful, so affordable!)

5."The Figure Skater"  Newspaper Blackout Poetry (exactly like it sounds) by Austin Kleon

6. Can't get any greener than Anastassia Elias's delicate toilet paper art