The pointless, yet poignant, crisis of a conifer

Tuesday looks to be Edgar McHerly day. And I'm OK with this eventuality. Ol' Edgar is a favorite around here, as regular readers will surely know, and last week we wrote about his recent Cameesa success. This week, we are celebrating a much larger step on his way to shirt world fame.

We find ourselves at Design By Humans, which is a nice place to find oneself when artistry is being discussed. The shirt? Two Trees. In a lot of ways it's not too different from what one might expect from DBH... it depicts what it says it depicts. Two trees stand alone. One is being chopped down. It's a capable silhouette job, and that it fills the whole shirt makes the starkness very nice against the white. But that's not the magic here. A single word balloon takes the piece from simple to sublime. The words are spoken by the second, unchopped tree: "Goodbye, Old Friend." All of a sudden it becomes insanely sad and powerful. They say that brevity is the soul of wit, but it can be equally true of any text... three simple, well chosen words elevate this far above what it is at first glance. It's that very human touch combined with a very popular visual topic that I feel will not only make this a favorite of mine, but a favorite of many.