Birthdays in my office require each person to get the honoree a gift and a card. By nature, I am against card-giving when presents are involved, for the simple fact that a gift seems sufficient in terms of thoughtfulness. At that point, the greeting card serves only to notify the recipient of the giver's identity, which can be accomplished using a flap of wrapping paper folded over and taped to the gift's top. However, given the antique-card proclivities of several officemates, the greeting card unfortunately is considered more important than the gift itself in my office, requiring the expenditure of more thought, energy, and oftentimes money.
   For a recent birthday, I chose to give John Lund's card based on his classic image Topiary Cat, the front of which depicts a chainsaw-wielding tabby admiring his hedge-clipping handiwork in or around what could be suburban San Diego. The inside reads, "Still sharp after all these years. Happy Birthday!" The accompanying gift consisted of two amber-shaded wine goblets and a $9.00 bottle of Pinot Grigio.
   Though keeping within his bread-and-butter "Animal Antics" oeuvre, Lund's Topiary Cat falls far short of the high quality we've come to expect from such works as Cat Tourist, Cake Jump, and the perennial crowd-pleaser Cat Dominatrix, in terms of both textual and illustrative craft. The image itself is a roughshod amalgamation of several different greeting-card styles rendered with little aesthetic regard. The digitally-modified tabby, we'll name him TC, is making a repeat appearance from his debut in Pumpkin Carving. However, our friend TC seems to be a one-trick tabby, adopting the same pose, with the same protective glasses and chainsaw. The technique of modifying photos of animals in such a way is not new, but Lund has shown himself in the past to be a master of the craft. Here, he seems to be at a loss for something new, and instead chose to rehash his earlier glory with little thought to originality.
   Lund has made the curious decision to place our protagonist in a realm in which he seems very out-of-place visually, even given the suspension of disbelief required when viewing many greeting cards. TC is, for all of Lund's enhancements, a normally-hued grey tabby. The setting, however, borrows from another popular greeting-card style, namely the black-and-white-photo-that-has-been-tinted-here-and-there-for-that-antique-feel style. Most often these cards are blank on the inside and feature either kids dressed up in grown-up clothes doing grown-up things and conveying grown-up emotions, or 1950s-era pictures of adults in the kitchen or the family room in a funny pose. Here, we find TC among suburban houses tinted in this manner, and the effect of seeing a normal cat backed by this odd, almost Day-Glo setting is jarring to say the least.
   The final touches on the card's image are the topiaries themselves: carved, we are left to assume, by TC to look like a cake with candles, a party hat, and a gift. These plants seem to be a mix of digitally-modified pictures and plain-colored-ink cartoon illustration. Next to the devilish TC and the watercolor houses, the topiaries seem to be almost an afterthought in terms of image quality. On the whole, none of the picture's segments mesh well, and the whole thing looks rather like a collage Lund spent maybe five minutes putting together from stock images he found in the "used" pile. Had more attention been paid, or even a weak attempt been made, to place the plants, the houses, and TC in some sort of common dimension, the image—regardless of personal greeting card taste—would at the very least have been more visually digestible.
   Which brings us to the cryptic message inside: "Still sharp after all these years. Happy Birthday!" The message makes sense and is moderately clever for a greeting card when viewed on its own, especially when coupled with perhaps a dog holding a knife above a lead pipe chopped in half. However, when taken in conjunction with the picture on the front, the greeting is nonsensical. What exactly is sharp in this picture? The teeth on the chainsaw? The cat, for having the intellectual and horticultural fortitude to carve up the bushes? The exceedingly fashionable protective glasses? The reader is left to wonder.
   Lund can do and indeed has done much better. Perhaps the saddest part of it all is that someone, somewhere, picked up this card and thought, "Oh! It's perfect for So-and-So!" without giving thought to the message the card sends: specifically "This card had a cat on it doing a funny thing, and you like cats, so I got it," (or maybe: "You are a lumberjack, and I know that the sight of a cat holding a chainsaw would make you laugh"...who knows). Such a perfunctory attitude toward greeting cards plays right into Lund's hands, and indeed encourages the kind of lackadaisical lack of pride and craftsmanship he displays in Topiary Cat.
   For my own part, I bought the card to make a specific point to people in my office: greeting cards that are this horrible are merely an afterthought and demand derision, especially if the artist who created it can't be bothered to think about what they've rendered.

John Lund's Topiary Cat can be viewed in its entirety at http://www.johnlund.com/page.asp?ID=538.

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