TREVOR Magnetic Attraction

TREVOR's Museum of Real Art

Gallery 4:

"Magnetic Attractions"

featuring Refrigerator Magnet Art

I LOVE MAGNETS!

   I have a huge collection: most of a fridgeful, most of two tall filing cabinet sides full, as well as a couple of boxfuls that I cleared off our old fridge when we got our new fridge a ways back and they never got back on again.
   I have a special fondness for refrigerator letters. For more than 30 years now, I've been playing with magnetic fridge letters. In fact, it say in Rule #12 of our written House Rules that are posted on the fridge: "Anyone may change the fridge letters at any time as long as it always says something and it's not rude."
   Right now, there's a sectioned basket full of letters sorted alphabetically on the kitchen counter beside the fridge for easy access. For a long time, all the letters were on the lower half of the fridge until a 2-year-old moved in and in a single arm movement swept nearly all of them off onto the floor every time he went into the kitchen. After a few days of picking up magnets, they moved to a basket on the counter!
   When my friend Robby Roiter lived here for an entire decade, we would spend lots of time anagramming whatever letters were there. (For those of you who don't know, an anagram is a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of another word or phrase. For example, "cinema" is an anagram of "iceman": they both have the exact same letters but in a different order.) Robby and I would also regularly stand there and tag-team anagram for 5-30 minutes just for the FUN of it!
   In fact, shortly after my lovely wife and I got married, she came home from work pretty tired one day one day and wrote, "I'm a sleepy muffin" on the fridge with letter magnets, and Robby and I spent the next several years anagramming that one! It was fabulous!
   Beside letters, I also have a wide variety of shapes, animals, commercial magnets, magnetic picture holders, etc... even hieroglyphic magnets that my best buddy Don gave me! Early in my career, I had some business magnets made that I'm still getting business from. (Note to self: get more of those!)
   Over the years, we've had quite a bit of FUN on our fridge. Here's just a very, very small sample for your enjoyment:

"Produce"
by Trevor

This is my all-time favorite piece of my personal fridge art. I had sorted all my fridge letters by color one day and noticed that the orange ones actually looked like an orange. So that set me an a mission to make the other colors into other edibles, too. (And for all you perfectionists out there, I know an egg is technically not really produce, but chickens produce them so....)
I'm not that good of a photographer, so the glare of the flash on the fridge kind of swallowed the "E" of the word "ORANGE", but rest assured that it really is there.

Our 8-year-old housemate Rowan, systematically went through our Music Room while they lived here and tried out every single instrument. He spent a lot of time on the ones he liked, and picked up and set down the ones he didn't really care for. He spent a LOT of time on the piano and actually wrote some really great music.

   But the first time he opened up my trombone, his eyes really lit up! I made this little sketch for him the next day in his honor.

"Magnet Man"

by Trevor

I don't remember anything about the circumstances around this piece. I only know I liked it enough to take a picture of it.

The next several pieces are what I think of as "Word Art"... they're both words and art.

"YIPPEE!"

by Trevor

Something great happened (I don't remember what), and I got all enthusiastic on the fridge! Once again, the flash glare nearly swallowed a letter, but the seventh word down is "YAY" (not "YA"); the final "Y" is white, and now that I've pointed that out you can see it easily, right?
A few notes on other words:
"Wunberbar" is German for "wonderful".

"Finestkind" is a quote from MASH, one of my favorite films. Don't remember who says it.
"Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" is from The Sound of Music.
And my Uncle George, the linguist, invented "Fantasmabeauscrumalishabsolugloriosplendiful". What a great word!

"Good-bye Nelson"
by Trevor

   Nelson VanVranken was one of my favorite housemates. What a wonderful man! He actually met his wife here at our house in the late '90s. Nelson had given me notice because he had decided to do some sort of three month internship somewhere far away, but the day he gave me notice was the same day that Amy and her very young son Brennan moved in.
   Within two weeks they were a couple.
   And when Nelson left for his internship, I left him this good-bye note on the fridge.
   But there's a very happy ending. Six weeks later, he cut his internship short and moved back into our house, but this time into Amy's room. They are now in their third decade of marriage, have three (or is it four?) more children, the first of whom may very well have been conceived right here in our house. Their Best Man at their wedding was another housemate, Paul, whom they're still very good friends with.
   It's true stories like this that make me feel really good about having housemates.

   The final three pieces are by my son Jason sometime between ages 8-12. He set himself a goal of using all the letters to write a cohesive paragraph. You'll notice he had to get a bit creative here and there: using an upside down "Q" for a "O", an upside down "J" becomes a "T" or an "I", a backwards "C" changes into an "O", a lying down "P" is also an "O", a "v" and an "r" together make a "Y", a sideways "m" becomes an "E", and other delightful interpretations.
   You may also notice that each one is longer than the one above it. That's because I got more letters, so the challenge became bigger!