Subtopia:

n. deceptively spacious subrural suburban paradise.

This is my rip-off of Lee Smith's wonderful "Life in the Burbs" painting. I recreated her piece in three dimensions on a real glass fishbowl using stained glass paint. The image is on both the front & back of the fishbowl. I purposely left the sides open to enable lightrays, (reflections & diffractions) coming through the bowl to make for some interesting and colorfully distorted (almost holographic) 3D image effects in the visible spectrum of light/color.

Ah, yes! Life in the suburbs... Paradise! Picket fences, 2.5 kids, an SUV and maybe even a dog. A generic, everyday landscape that everyone recognises... It could be Anytown, USA. It's the American Dream... But is it really?

Upon closer inspection, life here is never as ideal as it seems at first to be... (the grass IS always greener; keeping up with the Jones's yada, yada, yada)...

These days, suburban sprawl has evolved into a monotonous collection of standardized non-descript buildings in subdivisions.

It can definitely feel like you are living your life in a fishbowl...

Everyone in the neighborhood knows everyone else's business... and there's ALWAYS some juicy gossip being dished out, or dirty laundry being aired out, or skeletons in the closet just falling out, all at the most inopportune moments, of course. There's almost always a seedy underside to this seemingly perfect lifestyle.

Yes, sometimes these seemingly perfect suburban "Dreams on Maple Street" are really more like subtopia "Nightmares on Elm Street".

I titled my piece "SUB-topia", not only because it matched the definition so well, but also because the town is "SUB-merged" in a fishbowl. ;)

I'd like to thank Lee Smith for her wonderfully inspiring "Life in the Burbs" vision. You can see more of her work at ebay ID: artchick48.