underneath the nettle: strawberry holiday
Second Life is replete with opportunities that one wouldn't be able to experience in "real life" but there's no denying that the crux of its success is human interaction. Be it a coordinated meeting through a business opportunity, an introduction to a friend-of-a-friend or an entirely chance encounter, the opportunities to meet someone whose path you probably would never have the chance to cross otherwise are vast. It was a late-night wandering through a visually mesmerizing art display that offered one of those chance opportunities to meet Strawberry Holiday. A wrong turn in one of her expansive three dimensional art exhibits resulted in her shouting a greeting. Anyone who's had the chance to meet Strawberry knows that her strong, vibrant personality dominates and one just knows he's in the presence, of, well, greatness.
Strawberry's creativity is expressed in more than just Second Life. With a Bachelor of Arts degree with an emphasis in Visual Art and Social Science/Early Childhood Education, she serves as the director of a preschool in a small town called Friday Harbor on San Juan Island off the coast of Washington state. Her days are filled with developing the music and art curriculum and then implementing it, teaching the children to sing, dance and create. But, at the age of 24, she's experienced more in her life than most.
As a child, she always colored, organized flowers and was creative but not much of an artist. She remembers missing recess as her kindergarten teacher "Olga von Nazi" (name changed to protect the innocent, uh, hopefully?) would punish her for failing to color inside the lines, a task she was incapable of doing, or simply refused to do, even at that young age. When she was 13, a friend of hers who had always had an artistic gift convinced Strawberry to start drawing, asking her, “How are you going to get good at making art, if you never draw?” She didn't have an answer and instead purchased a sketch book and proceeded to draw a disturbing deformed goat/fawn man creature crawling up steps. (Certainly, the goat/fawn man creature will auction at 3.2 million USD someday.)
Strawberry did not begin her formal training into art until after her junior year of college while pursuing a degree in psychology. As a result of the immune system condition of Lupus she lives with, an experience with mono, the flu, and an undiagnosed and untreated case of food poisoning turned life threatening and caused her to drop out of school. Upon recovery, she decided that she wanted to live her life to the fullest and began her pursuit of the arts.
Strawberry’s canvas art of chalk pastels and/or watercolors, a result of a series of free association drawings where she simply poured ideas onto a page, can be viewed at her "Winged Strawberry Gallery" here in Second Life. There is no question, however, that her most intriguing work is the three dimensional displays. The idea happened almost by accident. At her store, Peachy Accessories, she put out some prims as abstract buildings. While people were highly impressed by the unique displays, her sales kept dropping and dropping. She knew she wasn’t hitting her niche market and decided to tear the whole thing down. Her first 3-D art installation in Second Life was the Fishbowl display, where those abstract buildings became the backdrop inside. Insert some seaweed, mermaids, and questions of her sanity, and a month later her build was complete and traffic increased and then surpassed previous amounts.
Her first piece of art led to an opening and in turn led to her next build called “Journeys” a fully interactive exhibit with visual and auditory effects that immerse the user in every stimulus Second Life can offer. Seemingly never satisfied with her accomplishments here in SL, she has already begun her third build scheduled to open in January, 2008.
New Exhibit
Strawberry's World, Prodigiosus II
Store
Peachy Clothing & Accessories, Paramit
Existing Exhibit
Journeys Exhibit, NMC Campus 9
Look for Strawberry's contributions monthly in Depth as she commences coordinating the visual art section of Art Throbs in the next issue.
www.strawberryholiday.com
