Figure 1
And now for something completely different. I would like to share a painting that I just completed that has nothing to do with mental health but has a lot to do with creativity and ways to improve your memory which I have previously written about.
Before I get into that, I would first like you to examine the painting (Figure 1) and just from looking at it take a guess what is it about. It’s not about the Simpsons specifically but something they are a part of.
Need a hint?
Hint #1: Look at the color scheme of the entire painting and see if you can make out a specific pattern.
Need another hint?
Hint #2: Flip the painting upside down
Figure 2
Does this look familiar? It is North America which includes the United States, and parts of Canada and Mexico. The painting is actually a map of North America turned upside down and the color scheme has to do with the flags of each country. You may ask why would I paint this? I’m familiar with the Simpsons but the truth is I haven’t followed them on television for over 20 years. The idea came to me in a dream in early 2013 and I decided I would attempt to paint what I remembered from the dream. I originally thought I would include a few landmarks and most of the Springfields throughout North America to give it a theme. There are 35 Springfields in the map indicated with a gold star (31 in the U.S, 4 in Canada). I predicted the painting would take about a year to paint since I was only planning to work on it an average 5-10 minutes a day as a way to stimulate my creativity muscles as I was starting to write my book. Even though the canvas is two by three feet, I realized over time I could include a lot more details than I originally thought and it evolved into a map with nearly 700 items that are geographical, historical and cultural in significance specific to either the state or province it is located in. I’ve included all 50 states, 11 Canadian provinces and 4 Mexican provinces and have learned a lot about all the regions. I had to decide what was important to include, whether the location on the canvas corresponded to the landmark’s exact map location, and how it fit in visually to the other elements around it. As time went on, it became clear this project would take much longer than I planned and I gave up the goal of ever completing it by a certain time. Then the pandemic happened, and since I was working from home, I suddenly had a lot more time to work on it. Hence, I was able to finish it on April 9, 2021, approximately 8 years and 2 months after I started it.
While I would love to discuss the entire painting in detail that would not be practical to do in one article but I will highlight 3 regions in particular and then discuss how this map might be useful to help children (and adults!) remember where things are even if they think they don’t have a good memory.
Figure 3
The first region I will discuss is the area around Homer Simpson which is southern part of the U.S. around Texas (Figure 3). You may notice Homer is wearing a Houston Astros hat with a NASA logo on it, a Dallas Cowboy logo on his left shoulder, and a T-shirt that says Texans AR OK. Just from that, you would know where Houston is in relation to Dallas and that the T-shirt is referring to the shared border between Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. In his left hand he is holding a lasso which is actually a rope of the full length of Highway 66 that extends from Chicago to Los Angeles and goes through 8 states. Homer is smelling beignets from Café Du Monde in New Orleans, Louisiana, a bordering state. He is standing in the Kansas City Royal baseball (Kauffman) stadium in Missouri. Even though I don’t include specific distances between these cities, just by using Homer’s body as a reference point, you get a sense of how far or how close the cities are from each other and where they are in relation to each other.
Figure 4
The second region is the southeast where Marge Simpson is standing in North Carolina next to a Tar Heel (Figure 4). Her blue hair covers most of the state of Florida with keys coming out of the top part for the Florida Keys, Minnie Mouse ears for Walt Disney World (Orlando), and an earring with the Burgundian Saltire Flag (the Spanish settlement in 1565 of St. Augustine). The Space Shuttle is being launched from Kennedy Space Center along the central coast. Marge is holding a peach in her right hand for Georgia, the Peach Tree State. Lastly, the bottom part of her blue dress has a white crescent and palmetto tree; South Carolina is the Palmetto State.
Figure 5
The last region I will highlight is in the northeast with New York and Pennsylvania (Figure 5). I decided that upstate New York would be best suited as a baseball field based on its shape. Even though the legend about Abner Doubleday inventing baseball in 1839 has largely been debunked, we do know that the modern rules of baseball were formulated in NY during the 1840s and the Baseball Hall of Fame is located in Cooperstown, indicated by a baseball in right field. Other highlights of the baseball field include logos for SUNY-Binghamton at 3rd base, SUNY-Oneonta at 2nd base, Syracuse University in center field, and Cornell (Ithaca) in left field. Home plate puts you somewhere in the Catskills nearby the original Woodstock Music Festival in 1969 (White Lake). The first base line contains Fort Ticonderoga, and the 3rd base line contains the Iroquois Nation sign and I Love Lucy TV show logo (Lucille Ball was born and raised in Jamestown). There is also a human hand in deep center field which indicates the Finger Lakes region. The hand says “Votes For Women” which refers to a poster slogan during the women’s suffrage movement of the early 20th century. The birthplace of the women’s suffrage movement is considered to be Seneca Falls and Susan B. Anthony lived in Rochester. Lastly, the thumb of the hand is pressing a Kodak camera; the Eastman Kodak Company was founded in Rochester.
If New York is a baseball field then it made sense to me to make Pennsylvania a Major League Baseball scoreboard given it’s rectangular shape. The scoreboard indicates the Philadelphia Phillies and Pittsburgh Pirates located in their appropriate areas in the state are playing against each other. The Hershey Bar refers to the town of Hershey, Heinz Ketchup to Pittsburgh and the Monopoly property of Reading Railroad (or Pennsylvania Railroad).
As I mentioned in a previous article, How Can I Improve My Memory? from January, 2021, our brains work in pictures and using the bodies of the Simpsons or a baseball field can serve as anchor points (places you are automatically familiar with) to help with image storage. This painting can also help in developing visual-spatial skills in that everything is flipped upside down and looks different from what we usually expect it to be. For some children, studying this map could be more appealing, generate more curiosity given the cartoon characters involved, and perhaps be even more effective than just learning about geography and history through traditional methods. Although I don’t claim to be an educator, my idea would be for a class to study the map with each student being assigned 2 U.S. states or so. The teacher would have the answer key and the students would need to research the list of items within each state. Even though I offer clues for each landmark, it still would require some investigation on the student’s part. For example, on the NY map I never actually mentioned the city of Rochester even though I’m referring to it indirectly. My hope is people could find out what each of the clues are referring to by doing an Internet search and then learn more about the item just through doing the research. At this point, I’m considering donating the painting to a local elementary school but I’m open to suggestions if others have other ideas on how to share this painting.