Florida Armor
Florida handed me an armadillo, and my brain turned it into a tiny Bauhaus parade float.
A black button nose. A red rear fender. One magnificent navy-blue body that looks half animal, half modernist chair. This little creature is built from loops, circles, slabs of color, and just enough attitude to suggest it knows exactly where it’s going.
I saw the real inspiration over the weekend in Florida — low to the ground, prehistoric, busy, completely unbothered. Armadillos have that wonderful look of an animal designed by committee: part tank, part handbag, part nervous loaf of bread.
But here, the mess of the real world gets edited down.
That’s the art lesson: abstraction is not making something vague. It’s finding the few shapes that tell the truth fastest. The long snout. The rounded armor. The low little chassis. The strange dignity of a creature that looks like it escaped from both a nature documentary and a design museum.
Artists like Alexander Calder, Joan Miró, and Sonia Delaunay all understood this kind of visual magic — the way a line can behave like a wire sculpture, the way a dot can become an eye, the way red, blue, black, and cream can make a whole personality walk across the page.
Fun fact: armadillos are one of the few mammals that can carry leprosy, which feels rude to bring up at brunch, but very on-brand for an animal that looks like a purse designed by a medieval engineer.
Florida gives you palm trees, heat rash, and occasionally a living football with a nose.
This one got promoted to art.
