The Sherree Tales are modern fables or fairy tales for the mildly neurotic (everyone I know who is sane in today’s world). They are allegories or myths (stories that have hidden meaning and are meant to teach a lesson) and are written to appeal to the child inside of adults or the place inside every adult that still wants to believe in magic. We may “grow up” but I believe that process only adds to who we are; it does not cause us to discard who we were as children. We may try to hide our youthful view, or deny that it exists, or even build a grown up wall so thick that neither we nor anyone looking at us can see we are still vulnerable and naïve about some things, but even those efforts do not destroy where we came from and who we were (the child inside). Even the coldest, most ram-rod straight, analytical adult has had moments of teary eyes (or at least a lump in the throat) when watching a movie or listening to music meant to tug at the heart. It is that place in every one of us for which these tales are written.

The idea for this project came from my years of working with people who were having emotional difficulties and discovering that even if I could plainly see a problem or viewpoint that was keeping them stuck, they often could not grasp the concept in a meaningful way. I started using analogies in my work with them and discovered they could more easily grasp the source and solution of their difficulties and tended to remember these insights and take action on them. The analogy was usually a one liner like, “You fight like two tigers with their tails tied together.” The use of analogies came easily to me because it is the way I have grasped and coped with my own difficulties over the years. Expanding the analogies from one-liners into modern myths for the miserable was a logical next step.

Writing the Tales was not enough. The first one I wrote was The Tigers and I decided I wanted to illustrate it too but using illustrations that represented the emotional content of a scene more than the literal content. As I reflect on what I was trying to do, I think about how art was used in early periods to depict religious or mythical stories that also carried lessons deemed important enough at that time to pass on. People would hear or read these stories over and over and when they saw the story represented in art, they would recall the story and the lesson. The same process is at work with children’s fairy tales but the artwork is generally softer. The point is that the art reinforced the story and the lesson. And again, the lessons were those things that people of those times thought were important to pass on. I grew up in a period of photography, abstract art, and cartoons. I was also heavily influenced by the art deco all around me in Miami when I was a child. The combination of these exposures left me searching for a way to visually express what was important to me and that was always strongly influenced by emotion, analogy, and simplicity. The artwork for my tales needs to be about what a scene feels like and what it means more than what it looks like.

In spite of my efforts to appeal to the child inside of the adult through tales and pictures, I soon discovered that some people are so disconnected from their imaginations and emotions, so walled off from their inner child, that they “needed” an adult explanation of what the tale was “about.” Without the explanation, they were too uncomfortable to be able to relax and just enjoy the story. Rather than fight this request and in order to make the lesson available to all who wanted it, I added a third section to the tales; a section for the grownup. This section also helps the grown up who has difficulty “getting it” to explain the tale to an “actual” child in a grown up way.