When Missy gets creative, she goes all in.

After 10 years of taking care of her, my wife and I have learned to expect … well, a certain enthusiastic lack of restraint in her work. Give her paint and the page will be filled in wild swoops of color. Give her magazines and she’ll thump the table vigorously as she glues their pictures into a collage. Give her foamies and the entire box may be upended on a single sheet of paper, like a soft-textured mountain range.

Her developmental disability makes it hard for her to communicate. But with space to work, her joy comes through loud and clear.

That’s true for many of us, I think. Provide a space, and we’ll make life a little more fun.

That’s where “Shock Art” comes in.

Shock Art is the annual Art In Public Places effort (in partnership with Longmont Power & Communications) to put some energy in art by putting art on energy. Specifically, a few artists each year are invited to decorate Longmont’s electric switchgear boxes around town, changing their muted green metal into a colorful canvas. Painters have decorated them with swarms of butterflies and undersea vistas, or reinvented them as a child’s alphabet block, or even made them a landscape of geek delight complete with a hobbit hole and a Doctor Who TARDIS.

Normally, it’d be time to finish collecting the entries and choosing this year’s displays. But this year, AIPP is extending the deadline. Interested artists now have until 4 p.m. on June 26 to fill out the submission form and deliver it with an 11-inch long by 10-inch wide by 7.25-inch high painted scale model demonstrating their concept, to either the Longmont Museum (400 Quail Road) or the Longmont Downtown Development Authority (320 Main St) during business hours. Those chosen will get a $2,000 stipend to complete the work. 

So if you’ve got a vision you’re enthusiastic to try, put together a mock-up and turn it in!  As you can see from prior entries, the sky is pretty much the limit.

And if you’ve been looking for foamies to use as a model – my apologies. I’m pretty sure Missy may have cornered the market.

I’m sure you understand.