Last weekend, the 115 Partition Street storefront in Saugerties that used to house Lucky Chocolates and its accompanying café – before founder Rae Stang sold the business and its new owners moved it around to the back of the building – became a pop-up gallery. The occasion was an art show titled “Images from The Daily Mouse: Tails from the Crisis,” and the painter whose works were on display was Stang herself. A component of the annual ShoutOut Saugerties festival, it was a proper art opening, with free refreshments including glasses of Cava sparkling wine, crackers with cheese. and cherry-filled chocolate mice.
Ringing the walls was a sequential series of illustrations – some watercolors, mostly acrylics – in which Stang has been chronicling the adventures of a mouse living through the Covid-19 pandemic. She began painting them in March, in her retirement home on the Gulf Coast of Florida, and posting one a day on her Instagram account.
“When the lockdown happened, I wanted to do a painting for my bathroom, with the mouse saying, ‘Wash your paws,”” she says. “I just painted every day for some hours. It was lockdown, so there was nothing to do.”
Word got around, and Stang found more and more people following her on Instagram. bright and inspirational without being overly cutesy, the paintings “cheered people up, kind of like PSAs,” she says. “They gave me feedback that it made them feel better. A lot of people said, ‘You should do a book,’ so I decided to self-publish it.”
And so The Daily Mouse: Tails from the Crisis came into being. Many of the panels offer commonsense advice on how to stay healthy during a pandemic, such as Wear a Mask, Get Some Rest, Stay Fit, At Least 2 Tails’ Length Apart. Get Some Fresh Air shows the mouse character walking a ladybug on a leash.
Others suggest ways to stay cheerful and make the best use of enforced downtime: Keep a Journal, Learn a New Language, Plant a Garden, Lend a Paw. The passage of time is marked with paintings honoring Mother’s Day, Arbor Day, Earth Day, World Book Day, graduations.
The mouse’s outlook isn’t all rosy. More somber panels acknowledge the hardships of 2020: This Too Shall End, Homeschooling Isn’t Easy, Mourn Our Losses, Sheltering in Place Can Be Lonely.
Events in the news pop up as well, including an admonition to Say Their Names. The grimmest image shows the adult mouse with a mouse child peering warily out from their mousehole at a burning city on the horizon, with the legend, Sometimes It Feels like the End of the World. In aggregate, the art works are a testimonial to the admonition of novelist Maxine Hong Kingston that one of them quotes: “In a time of destruction, create something.”
The mouse character made his earliest appearance in advertising designs that Stang created while she was still running Lucky Chocolates. The pandemic gave him a deeper narrative that needed expression. “At first I thought he was me, but now he’s not. When people ask me what his name is, I tell them, ‘I don’t speak Mouse.’”
Handsome hardcover copies of the art book are now available from BookBaby and Amazon for $40. Giclée prints of the individual panels are for sale for $25 on paper, $50 on canvas. Call 914- 462-2939 for information about viewing and purchasing.
Meanwhile, the series will continue, Stang says: “The mouse still has things he has to say. These things take on a life of their own.” You can follow his adventures at instagram@r.stand13.
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