I just got a pack of notecards and a sweet blah-blah mug from Abrah Griggs, I have to say I love it, I’ll drink from it every time the news comes on. Check out her quite lovely new cards and mugs. She has a way of looking at the world that I greatly admire. And share.
I am happy to introduce some of you to the magical world of Abrah Griggs, a Vermont artist and illustrator who has a wonderful and dysfunctional relationship with bugs, insects, and the far side of nature. She has just started offering her very brilliant and original mugs and postcards for sale.
Abrah lives in nature and loves to study the character of spiders, frogs, snails, butterflies, inchworms and other denizens of the outdoors. In many of her works, they speak. She is wary of bugs and insects but fascinated by them, and that is good for us.
She brings them vividly to life with with her notecard sets, imagination and badly needed humor. Her work is starkly original and very compelling. Between Gus and her sketches, I’m smiling all day.
I’ve ordered a mug and five notecards. I highly recommend taking a peek at her work.
It is very inexpensive but I doubt it will be inexpensive for long. Nobody else has notecards like this.
I don’t usually plug things on the blog, but the most wonderful notecards about animals and nature have gone on sale this week from an artist I have come to know and love.
Her name is Abrah Griggs and she lives in Vermont and is shy and unassuming, which is why she is charging so little for these cards, I think they are brilliant, and they reflect her very wonderful and idiosyncratic and ironic sensibilities about birds, lightning bugs, moths, frogs, spiders, butterflies, dragonflies, cats, mosquitoes and rodents.
It is increasingly rare to find a true original and individual spirit in label-crazy America today, Abrah is one of them. She is a very talented artist as well. She is one of those people who undervalues her work sometimes, and the notecards should fix that.
The notecards are funny and original and really appealingly priced -$3.75 for one, $13.00 for four plus shopping. I would say underpriced. Great notecards to use, and a memorable gift. And I see a lot of animal stuff. I want to tape some of them to my study wall.
Abrah is not yet set up to take orders online, so if you want the cards you will have to do it the old-fashioned way – s-mail and e-mail. You can e-mail her at [email protected] and see the notecards here: I’ve ordered five sets, they are very, funny, inventive and original. Abrah has mastered the challenge of being hilarious and touching at the same time. Not an easy trick.
Griggs, who is putting together the Mansion Book Of Stories, has a great and very dry perspective about life in nature.
I love the way she and her creatures look at the world. Once a year, she appears at one of our Open Houses, and I much look forward to her visits.
Abrah Griggs lives way out in the Vermont woods and ponders the bugs and insects of our world all the time. Like me, she has an ambivalent relationship with the outdoors, but finds it fascinating, we are lucky for that.
She puts some wonderfully funny words in the animals and insects mouths, and her imagination is refreshing and original. Her notecards are really worth a look, I think. There is something very special about them.
I call people like Abrah Griggs “Creative Facilitators,” they help people like me, and perhaps you, connect the creative forces within us to the world outside of us, she is one of those rare and very gifted people who are themselves intensely creative but who have also mastered the varied new technologies that help us take the great leap of faith and put our ideas out in the world.
In a sense, Steve Jobs was the inventor of this kind of creative angel, he made the tools that make it possible for me to be an author and photograph, and share, store and distribute my work. I know little of how these tools work, but I know they are the path for me, and for my future.
Abrah is an artist and illustrator who is also a book compositor, e-book designer and blogger, she connects people to the online sites – like Create Space – that can show and share their work and find an audience. Her new blog In My Nature, is a poignant and beautiful testament to her creativity and her promise.
I believe Abrah and people like her are the future of the new creativity, combining writing, artistry, design and other traditional arts with people – like me – who need them and want them – but struggle to keep up these wonderful new ways of community.
This is the future for people who once needed big publishing houses and galleries to sell their work, but who can now make a living embracing change and new ways of thinking about creativity and technology. We don’t need middlemen to approve our stories and voices, we can put them out in the world now by ourselves and make our own destiny. That is the story of my blog.
We can rot and get moldy and lament the lost good old days, which were never that good, or move forward.
Abrah Griggs is a warrior for this kind of change. Her art is wonderful as well, and when she is not creating e-books and designing books and cards and catalogues, she is out in nature, observing and writing about it. The future is right here, and creative people do not have to wait months and years to be rejected by editors, academics, publishers and galleries – they can put their good work right out in the world and reach countless numbers of people.
I met Abrah in the most interesting way, I went on a local website to defend a friend and myself from the kinds of cowardly and snarky attacks that are a sad but inevitable part of the Internet now, and I replied to one of the anonymous posters. A day or so later, I got a message from Abrah, she was one of those posters, that kind of thing, she said, was not really her and she didn’t want to be on that site any longer.
She joined the Creative Group At Bedlam Farm and is moving ahead with her brilliant skills. I met Abrah in October when she came to our Open House. She was impressive, shy, gifted, profoundly connected to the natural world, and the new world of personal publishing. I had the sense she was a bit uncomfortable meeting me, that happens a lot, but we will get passed it. Perhaps we already did.
I thought it was one of the classiest messages I have ever received. It reaffirmed my belief that human connections often prevail over the raging hostility that passes for dialogue in the minds of many people, and once we see one another as humans, and not as labels or stereotypes, we can permit ourselves to be human.
When I saw Abrah’s original and surprising work – she loves to draw idiosyncratic spiders and bugs – I knew she was absolutely correct about herself, her creative spark was revealed.It is a great joy to spread the word about someone like Abrah, she is the real deal, she will go as far as she wishes to go.
She is on the right path, cranking out wonderful work almost daily and helping to connect creatives with the new tools of the wider world. And if you have creative work inside of you, as I believe everyone does, think about setting it free, with Abrah or anyone else who can help you do it.
I highly recommend checking out her ideas, her art and her new blog, In My Nature. There, you’ll find a wonderful sketch on her Musings page, it is of a dragonfly with the caption that reads “If You Rest In The Sunshine, Long Enough, You’ll Fly Again…” and above it, the heading, “I’ve Rested Long Enough…”
I love that sentiment and commend it highly. Me, too, I thought before I changed my life. I hope she will sell this piece to me. Abrah has rested long enough, she is flying now. You can see her blog and work here.
I’m excited to see Abrah Grigg’s latest rough sketch today for a new banner for bedlamfarm.com as we proceed with our redesign.
I love this direction, I think I most like either the belly dancing sheep on the letter “D” or the donkey straddling the letter “M.” But the more i look at it, the more I like them all.
I also love the donkey lounging around on “B.”
Abrah Griggs, the gifted artist and graphic designer working on my new blog banner, has a special gift for capturing the personalities of bugs and spiders and other inanimate objects. Animals too.
The sketch is growing on me the more I look at it. I’m not sure about four animals, but I like the ones I see. I love the feeling of the animals not taking the blog seriously, using it to perch on or dance on or just hang out on. That’s the true nature of animals, and the feeling of the blog.
Serious, but never too serious, and never to be taken too seriously. The yin and yang of the place.
I like the tone of irreverence and the sense of the animals themselves, this is one of the things Abrah is a genius at, capturing the personalities of animals. I’m very happy with this.
This is pretty close to it for me. Let me know what you think. Abrah is quite wonderful. Her sensibility is my sensibility, I’m just not as talented.
You can e-mail me at [email protected], comment on my Facebook Page, or right her on the bottom of the blog.
