Sacramento artists of all sorts have been asked by Richard St. Ofle and Jesse Vasquez to contribute to a weekly "participatory art project" on their new blog, "Topical Thursday."

On "Topical Thursday," Sacramento's most creative are asked to consider a topic and contribute their interpretation, in whatever form they choose, to the blog. According to St. Ofle, the contributors will be "mostly artists, but also writers as well . . . we wanted to limit it to people who do something creative, but not just visual art."

St. Ofle and Vasquez, themselves artists, reveal a new topic every Thursday, as the blog's name implies.

Past topics have included "guilty pleasures" and "secrets." Upcoming topics are: the American way, color, and the Mark Twain quote referencing "Lies, damn lies, and statistics." Says St. Ofle about the topics, "we want to keep them loose enough to be interpreted, or misinterpreted, but also thought-stimulating . . . we would never have a topic about grocery stores, we try to keep in the abstract."

“It was important for us,” says St. Ofle, “to create a format that kind of showcases a lot of our friends’ work on a week-to-week basis — we have friends that put together these incredible art shows, and then you don’t see anything from them again for six months, and this is a way of breaking that feast/famine cycle of good art.”

The blog is designed both to promote local artists and to serve as a creative exercise to produce ideas. Contributions have been made in written stories, drawings, photography, and links to websites, videos, and articles online.

St. Ofle said the artists' responses to his requests have been overwhelmingly positive. "I think people like that kind of brain exercise, doing something you wouldn't have picked for yourself."

For interested readers, Topical Thursday can be found here.