My mom is amazing with mail. She sends incredible packages and letters and the one that showed up on our steps on Valentine’s Eve was no exception. There were heaps of fun clothes for Charlotte, chocolates for us, and Burt’s Bees like you wouldn’t believe (this is one great smelling kid!). On top, though, was the prize:
As you might be able to gather from this first image, letters are not just a digest of recent events, as far as my mom is concerned, and they are rarely just text. Letters are an opportunity to recount stories, explore ideas, play with images, and send a little bit of yourself to someone.
For the last several months, my mom has been doing painstaking work, creating a series of panels about the history of orthodontia (seriously!) for a commissioned piece. The images included on our letter are color xeroxes of sections of those panels and their preliminary drawings.
Mom is going to write a little about these on her own blog, so I don’t want to steal her thunder, but I had to share the selection we received! Each of these illustrations is unbelievably intricate and filled with playful details (a train car straightening the Sphinx’s teeth! an elaborate system of gears and pulleys to align Constantine’s choppers!) and they’re in a style that will always be full of nostalgia for me.
When I was small, my mom did art fairs all over the midwest (gobs and gobs and gobs of art fairs) and much of her work at the time was highly illustrative, colorful, invented, and playful. Although she’s moved well past that style in her current work, I love seeing glimpses of the old days in these new orthodontic panels. Did I mention how thrilled I am that Charlotte has one of the world’s most imaginative grandmothers?
I have to ask: have teeth ever been this cool?
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