Hi,

I’m a professional artist and a director of an arts program. We are working on a blog about ideas and inspirations for making your own style in the world of mushroom art. I need an image that is central to the whole thing but can be used as a header or other elements on the site. Can you help me out?

Thanks!

Mushroom Art is the art of making your own style, by making your own rules. It’s a blog I would like to write.

My name is Andrew J. Simpson, and I am an artist, writer, designer and photographer who lives and works in Athens, OH. I am fascinated with how people express themselves creatively and the ways that art informs identity. I’ve been interested in mushrooms for a long time, and became interested in mycology professionally when I was hired by Ohio University to make a comprehensive guide to mushrooms of Ohio. Mushroom identification is not just about learning about mushrooms; it’s about learning more about yourself.

After the book was published, I began making mushroom paintings as a way to practice mycology outside of work. I started posting photos on Flickr as a way to share them with others. After talking with other artists who had made artwork inspired by or featuring mushrooms, I realized there were many talented artists out there who were also making art related to fungi. And that there was an opportunity to collect some of this artwork together into one place. That place will be my blog, Mushroom Art: http://mushroom-art.blogspot.com

I’d like to invite you to visit the blog now and then to check out

I am looking to create a website that will allow me to feature and sell my paintings, as well as display my blog. The website is going to be entirely separate from my business cards, flyers, etc.

I am looking for a logo that could be a stylized “mushroom” with some depth and dimension. I want something simple, but also unique and distinct enough to catch the eye and stand out among other logos.

The theme of the website will be “mushroom art”, so something mushroomy would be ideal. I would like for it to be bright, colorful and fun.

There are two main sections of the website: 1) About Me: This section will include my bio which will include my education and previous work experience (see attached). 2) Gallery: I need this section to be able to feature both original paintings and prints.**

**Please feel free to suggest things you feel may work better than what I have described above.”

P.S. the blog would be called “The Mushroom Art” or something like that.

I will make this art free to use. I will use it myself and share it freely. In return, I ask that you give credit to “Fungi Perfecti” where appropriate, and send me a copy of whatever you create. Share your ideas with us and we’ll give them back in kind.

We are creating a new genre of art, and we need your help. Let’s make some beautiful art together!

Send your work or questions to gail@fungi.org

The word “mushroom art” is a little silly, but I don’t want to risk offending people with a more prosaic term. My hope is that readers will be intrigued enough to go on to the website even if they think the title sounds kind of funny.

This is somewhat of a long-form blog. It’s designed for people who are interested in psychedelic art but have never quite found the right place or time to explore it. The site will have articles and interviews and reviews, but most of all it will have links. Links to resources, links to galleries and museums, links to art blogs and other sites that might be useful for people who are interested in this stuff, but don’t know where to start.

The idea is that someone else went through a lot of this material already and compiled it into one place. So although I’m not an expert on any of these topics, I am a kind of browser or aggregator or curator, rather than an inventor or innovator. The value-add I plan to add is personal voice: writing about what I see and why I think it’s interesting.

If you understand why many people prefer something to nothing, it helps a lot to explain things that are hard to understand. For example, if you want to convince a conservative that climate change is real, or a liberal that tax cuts sometimes increase revenue, it is much easier if you can point out how their beliefs are connected to things they already accept.

I have recently been reading about the history of ideas of probability and statistics. It makes sense that I would find this interesting: I work at Facebook, which has grown from 10 people my first year to over 3000 now, in part because we use statistical methods to make decisions. But I hadn’t appreciated the degree to which probability and statistics have permeated our everyday lives in other ways as well.

In particular, I had not appreciated the extent to which advances in psychology and behavioral economics have been built on the foundation of ideas studied by mathematicians working on probability before psychology was a field at all. Many of the heuristics used by economists and psychologists were invented by mathematicians working on problems like: how should we choose cards randomly for an upcoming game? How do we predict the outcome of a coin toss? Should we buy insurance?

These problems are far removed from the kinds of problems studied by psychologists. But they