The Blowfish who Stole my Weekend.

Porcupinefish are also called blowfish because they have the ability to inflate their bodies by swallowing water or air, thereby becoming rounder. This increase in size (almost double vertically) reduces the range of potential predators to those with much bigger mouths. A second defense mechanism is provided by the sharp spines, which radiate outwards when the fish is inflated.

I like more the name blowfish, because it allows me to relate to some characteristics that can be found in human behavior. For example, the wish to look bigger, more important, and a bigger menace then one really is.

Again I have been wasting my weekend on some visual arts project instead of working on the fourth part of my series. It all came along when I showed my other better half a picture of a blowfish and she mooned “can’t you do something artistical with that?”

The first image that popped into my head was the goldfish in a bocal that figures prominently in Monty Python’s “The Meaning of life”, so it’s not astonishingly that the first thing I came up with looked like this:

And no, that particular design didn’t take me too long. About an hour or so. It’s just that it deviated my thinking processes towards unexpected paths that made me contemplate about what people believe is the meaning of life. After some reflection I decided that there are three things that most people seem to believe worthy to strive for: wealth, eternal youth, and power. Most marketing campaigns center around one, two, or all three of these three subjects.

So the remainder of my weekend went up working on the following design:

In this design you see a mermaid holding a flask containing the elixir of eternal youth, who’s chased by a shark. Below her you find a blowfish carrying a nazi symbol in his mouth, who symbolizes the megalomaniacally rhetoric of many power hungry politicians with their inflated egos. Under them you have a sea monster that bears some resemblance with a moray eel that chases a bundle of banknotes. Under it you have an evil grinning clown fish. In the left corner under you can see what an Einstein goldfish answers when asked about the meaning of life, while in the right corner at the bottom you have a Tsubaki goldfish staring in bewilderment at the stone that carries the title of this painting. In the left part of the painting you find yours truly when I was a couple of years younger and still in my hammerhead phase of a becoming human being.

That was the story of how the blowfish stole my my weekend.