Believe it or not, I tried to find a mainstream audience for these kooky postcards on Etsy, before I decided to keep it simple, and very local, by selling them at the Farmers’ Market this summer. In the three or so weeks I was on Etsy, I only got one order — from my 11-year-old daughter, who was an absolute peach for wanting to support her mom’s first commercial artistic endeavor. But my point is, Etsy wasn’t for me. Too many fees, too much red tape, and, at the end of the day, too many absolutely generic hacks posing as artists. When I searched up “original postcard designs” on the site one day, I was dismayed to discover the kind of blah creations that looked like they came out of a Hallmark store, circa 1994. (I would know, because that was my very first job, at age 14.) So I hope that screw your bullshit Etsy shoppe will become a rallying cry against terrible, basic hacks making terrible, basic “art,” not in the name of self-expression or originality, but because they thought it would be “cute” or “profitable” to capitalize on the terribly basic tastes of so many terribly basic consumers. You know what art really is? Art is emotion. It is feeling. It is ideas and it is opinions, channeled into blood, sweat, and tears for a seeming eternity, before it finds its perfect expression in some sort of visual or audio medium. In other words, art requires heart, and any act of the heart is an act of tremendous courage, faith, and determination to say something real, in the midst of so many conformist drones. So I’ll say it again: screw your bullshit Etsy shoppe, and show me something real. Show me a piece of you, ripped from the heart, still warm and beating. ❤️‍🔥— E.S.