Through the Looking Glass with Mike Stimpson by Andrew Walker

There are many different views to loose yourself in around Redbubble, from breathtaking landscapes to pictures that express the human condition concisely in 6×9, while along the way there remains opportunity to show off lots and lots of pink wobbly bits . Cruising around these different areas, while doing ones best not to get too distracted by the pink wobbly bits , you occasionally come across an artist (and they truly are artists) that make the rest of the world sit up and take notice . One of these ‘artists’ is an incredibly talented guy known as Mike ‘Lego head’ Stimpson who has agreed to talk to me over a bowl of lithium flakes and a hot cup of Benzedrine, about the what, why, where and the who that relate to his work… hmmmm that’s a hell of a lot of doubleyous!

So that’s the W’s sorted out, but I gotta tell you, I sure was surprised by his choice of meeting places! I was expecting a globally franchised coffee shop or maybe somewhere that provided the customer with alcohol. Instead I had to drive for 13 hours straight, deep into the furnace of the deep desert to a troglodyte canteen (that means it’s underground guys before you think of goblins and trolls) it’s a little unusual to say the least. Getting in there I had to grease the palm of the smallest bouncers you ever did see! Short guys in maroon cloaks… weird! Inside is no better, the clientele have clearly crawled out of the gutter to be here tonight, one or two have way to many tentacles for my liking. I can’t help but think I’m coming down with that strange French disease that makes you think you have been somewhere before (perhaps a galaxy far, far away!).

The barman grunts his displeasure at my asking him for an Alaskan polar bear cooler (a drink designed to put testicles on your chest), but he was happy enough to point me in the right direction of Mr Stimpson. Towards the back of the place were several dim booths, there in the darkest sat a guy lounging with the confidence that only smugglers and top photographers have… unfortunately it turned out to be the wrong booth as he was chatting to an old geezer about travelling to some place called ’Alderaan’. Boy did they seem upset with my interruption! mind you they were nice enough to point me to the right booth once I showed them my Redbubble press credentials and that is how I got to be sitting opposite one of the most unusual people in the bubble.

This guy is short… really short, like an inch high! (no he isn’t a private investigator and he got quite upset when I suggested he might like to be) On the booths table sat a smaller table where Mr Stimpson appeared glued to his seat (by plastic studs that erupted out of his chair and plunged into the back of his legs) his face appeared painted on his expression difficult to read. It wasn’t the tiny Leica around his neck that gave him away as a master of the shutter and f-stop , he also exuded an aura of confidence that filled the area around him. This aura of greatness was broken by his high pitched squeaky voice. Difficult to hear at the best of time the hubub of the crowd made it nigh on impossible to make out what he was saying. Stimpo offered to take me somewhere quieter and introduce me to a little more of his world! Now this flummoxed me I had assumed that all his work was made in a studio (okay a very small studio) using a child’s plastic block building system.

Watching the minuscule Mikey move was very odd, clearly he was moving but my eyes would only focus on him as a frozen figure in mid flight, this made my eyes water, blur and need blink, with each blink he was further away, five blinks and a couple of cross eyed seconds later and he was out of the bar leaving me to settle his bar tab. How such a small guy managed to run up such a large bar tab I have no idea! By the time I made it outside there was a small blocky vehicle vibrating gently on the sandy path I say vehicle it might have been a gun or a space ship made from oblongs off plastic stuck together, all I knew was there was no way that I was going to fit in the passenger seat of the thingamubob next to the pipsqueek photo monkey who was pointing his leica at me… big flash and tiny click and with the flash spots still dancing in my eyes I had the strangest feeling come over me. As the spots cleared I looked up at a much larger whatchamacallit with a much larger Mike pointing to the passenger seat… his voice was much deeper now “Don’t worry it‘s only for a short time the effects will wear off before you know it“ he winked and the vehicle shot of into the deep desert… very strange… hic… must be something to so with downing that Alaskan polar bear cooler and exposing myself to fresh air!

My eyes swam… damn alcohol… the sea of sand whizzed past, I guess it must have been less than an hour later and the vehicle rested on a hill overlooking the largest city I have ever seen, it stretched for miles in every direction! Surely a city of this size must have been common knowledge around the bubble? Although I seem to recall that the deep desert was also known as the deserted desert! Only the thick rhubarb groves that grew near the custard pools provided the deserted desert with any dessert. But apart from these the whole area was a void to be avoided. Yet here was a massive city, filled with… filled with tiny people!!! My hind-brain kicked back pointing out to my fore-brain that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore and the only explanation (logical or not) was that I had been shrunk and wasn’t drunk… although my hind-brain now really really wanted the security blanket that alcohol provides. For all this time I had assumed that his pictures had been copies of real world masterpieces made with the use of little plastic people… turns out they are real! Michael explained that his models were the ‘Legolee’s’ and their civilization mirrored the bigger world! That meant… that meant oh god no! my skin crawled… somewhere in this heaving metropolis was a minuscule Jo O’Brien in the all together being photographed by a microscopic Paul Vanzella! Oh the inhumanity of it!

Driving down the boulevards of this metropolis I was struck by the lack of people out on the streets. It took a while for Mike to break his silence and explain what was going on. Turns out that the city was under marshal law and a day time curfew was in place, Michael had taken it upon himself to document the situation, the day to day life that the Legolee had to live through. Turns out that the Legolee had once been widespread throughout the Bubble until a heartless group of monsters had turned up and started preying upon the peace loving legolee. The Legolee had a name for the monsters that stalked them… CHILDREN! The destroyers of legolee, reducing their cities to rubble and murdering the inhabitants in gruesome ways . This was the last bastion of the Legolee and was only safe for its remoteness but the city elders didn’t want to take any chances, so the city appeared a ghost town during the day.

My head swam, hind and fore brains in open revolt again! Hours of cruising around this wonderful metropolis seeing the sites had me hitting information overload! The next thing I remember was waking in my bed with a handful of stunning photographs and a tiny note that simply said ‘Let them know.’ and now you do!