Victoria’s Elizabeth Litton is a small-r rebel. Take the artist’s newly minted guerrilla art movement, Leave Only Loveliness. Litton is calling on like-minded folk to stick her tiny ladybug sculptures all over the place. You know, park benches, street-light posts and so forth.
Of course, distributing these ladybugs could take a while, as Litton has handmade 9,500 of them.
And she plans to make more.
“There is no limit,” she said, offering one of those “and I really mean it” smiles.
I met Litton at her Fernwood-area studio. Her super-friendly dog Bolt, a four-year-old pug/French Bulldog cross, kept leaping onto my knees to lick my face.
Leave Only Loveliness is all about artistic good-heartedness and — let’s face it — obsession. It takes a rare kind of person to handcraft 9,500 ladybugs, all smaller than the head of a thumbtack. Each is rolled out of clay, baked in a kiln and then carefully painted red, black and white.
Litton, a 39-year-old native of South Africa, started making ladybugs in February. She made them while waiting for her 14-year-old son after dropping him off for his music lesson. She made them while visiting with friends.
“They come around for tea and sit around my kitchen table. And I’ll be painting bugs,” she said.
To join Litton’s guerrilla art movement, one need only message her via Facebook.
Her page is called Leave Only Loveliness. She’ll send you a little mustard-coloured envelope containing 10 ladybugs and a tiny package of glue.
She hopes you’ll tell her where you’ve glued your ladybugs, and perhaps even send a photograph.
So far, she has sent ladybug packages to Alberta, Tennessee, Switzerland, South Africa and Scotland.
Litton says Leave Only Loveliness is so-named because a group of ladybugs is known as a “loveliness” (sort of like a swarm of bees or a murder of crows).
Guerrilla art is another term for street art, that is, art displayed in public places. The street artist Banksy is arguably the most famous practitioner. For the guerrilla artist, permission is not necessary. Putting such art offerings in public places is not always strictly legal, however.
Litton acknowledges Leave Only Loveliness might fall into the not strictly legal category.
“It is illegal, technically. It is. I’m littering. I’m leaving stuff around, aren’t I?” said the artist.
When it comes to art, there’s often a fine line between being creative and being obsessive compulsive. Sometimes there is no line.
Litton is the first to admit there’s a dollop of obsessiveness to her art.
To make each ladybug, she must touch it at least 12 times. Making 9,500 meant 114,000 touches. Surprisingly, Litton hasn’t tallied up the hours she’s spent making ladybugs.
“My husband is so distressed with me, because there’s no way I could make back the money from the time I’ve spent,” she said, adding: “He’s the one who would count them. Because he likes to count things.”
If one examines Litton’s past art projects, one can discern a bit of a pattern. She once made several dozen small paintings, each depicting a single begging bowl, and left them in public places, including London’s Tate Modern gallery and the Guggenheim in New York City. Litton has also created more than 40 paintings of her son over his lifetime. She once made 500 paintings portraying tiny human figures — also a guerrilla art project.
“And,” she said, “I made a life-sized cow, which we suspended from the ceiling of our tiny apartment.”
Litton helpfully leaves contact information on her guerrilla art pieces, such as a QR code, so viewers can get in touch. Usually the responses are positive, although one New York security guard (she’s forgotten what he was guarding) did reprimand her about a begging-bowl painting.
“He was going on about terrorism. I’m like, it was a painting.”
In part, it was depressing news reports that spurred Litton to create Leave Only Loveliness. She cites such stories as the kidnapping of the Nigerian girls and poachers who saw the horns off still-living rhinoceros.
She chose ladybugs for her latest art project because they are the least offensive subject she could think of.
And besides, everyone likes ladybugs.
“They will, hopefully, make most people think: ‘Why? Why here?’ That’s nice, you know.”