Accordions and Bengals

Some time last year,  I learned about The Night Garden Project and was immediately taken with it because it’s all about collaboration and the crossroads of ideas. It seems to have begun with gnomes and a rooftop garden (You can read about the origin here).

Photo by Megan Granholm

This Spring, the folks over at the Night Garden have decided to host an Inspiration Series, an opportunity for creative folks to get inspired by a particular artist’s work and raise money for the Great Lakes Bengal Rescue (GLBR) in the process.

The first artist to be highlighted/inspirational in the series is Jason Webley. Off stage, Jason is soft-spoken, genuine, and thoughtful. On stage and armed with his accordion, he’s like a musical pirate shaman creating worlds and breaking down preconceptions with his incredible sound. Truly.

From The Night Garden Website:

Every couple of months we will feature a new guest artist under the Inspiration tab in the sidebar (that will appear March 1, when we post our first guest’s contribution). Each guest artist will contribute a piece of art, and you’ll be invited to respond with original art of your own: anything, in any medium, whatever the guest artist’s piece brings out in you. Give it form, then show it to us! Write stuff. Photograph stuff. Draw stuff. Cook stuff. Make a bracelet. Knit some socks. Put on a puppet show. Listen to what the piece says to you, then say something back.

Entries for the first round in the series will be accepted beginning March 1, 2011 through April 30, 2011. More information can be found on The Night Garden website. Check it out, get inspired, donate!

There will be a new artist announced every few months, including a few you may know well (and personally).

😉

I leave you with this…

Published by Valya

Valya Dudycz Lupescu is the author of Mother Christmas, The Silence of Trees, Forking Good, and Geek Parenting. She is also the editor of Embroidered Worlds: Fantastic Fiction from Ukraine and the Diaspora, published in 2023 by Atthis Arts. Valya earned her MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been published in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Ukrainian American Poets Respond, Kenyon Review, Strange Horizons, Mythic Delirium, and others. Valya has been making magic with words and food for 25 years, incorporating traditions from her Ukrainian heritage with practices that honor the Earth.

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