I love owls! They’re sleepy fluffy deadly predators. It’s the dichotomy that pleases me.

We all have the soft and hard edges that war within us. The part of us that is cute, sweet, somewhat cuddly gets more and more edges as we grow older. We learn we can bite. If we’re lucky we learn we don’t always have to.  It’s like the edges calcify. But what makes owls fascinating to me is the balance between the too.

I love that owls aren’t not exactly a forest animal. There’s a population of  owls living in cities. Supposedly they are territorial and love skyscrapers. They tend to keep the pigeon population down.

 I lived for years near Devon Street in Chicago. Devon Street is a united nations consisting of blocks that blend  from Assyrians, Russians, Bosnias, Pakistani, Hindustani,  and European Jewish cultures. It’s the shopping version of the world done by Disney.Without anyone singing it’s a small world after all.  There was a photography store called Hoots, I believe. It had a plastic owl on the highest ledge of   the building. It was high enough that I couldn’t tell if it was real or not. In the end, I decided it didn’t matter. Plastic or live, I want my city to have owls.

When the FACET group did a show called Chicago Blues, I couldn’t resist it.

I had the Hoots owl, singing the blues. Of course I called Chicago Blues.

Tags: Chicago, Devon Street, FACET, owls

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013 at 8:18 am and is filed under Art Outside the Box, art statement, series. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.