Paintings are Hookers

"Fiddlesticks" - mixed media on reclaimed wood, 24" x 24".  Ready to hang.  Making its public debut in June at Ciel Gallery.  Inquiries: imajenation@gmail.com

When are Monday's the best day of the week?  When they follow a weekend of yard-work and dumpster diving!  Ahhhh. The bliss of screaming muscles and newly planted tangelo trees and agave plants, covered in the loamy aroma of fresh mulch.  It will be all I can do to lift my arms today.   But I have a garage full of salvaged wood to paint and half of our latest yard project done, so I've earned every ache.

I've  missed yard-work.  Now, before you go off thinking I'm a loony, know that I've been a yard-worker since I was a wee one when dad made us haul rocks up from the creek through the woods and into our yard.  Ever thrifty, he used child labor to provide pavers and stone walls for the garden.  You'd think the experience would have ruined gardening for me, but instead it ingrained hard outdoor work deeply in to the fiber of my being.  I have hauled rocks and mulch and turned over soil ever since.  

Until the accident last July.  Physicality is now something to be carefully planned, knowing I've got a short window of strength and a long recovery time afterward.  So now it is precious - not to be squandered, this body and its frail bones.  

I am slowly coming to the end of Clear Seeing Place - dragging my feet on completing it because I don't want it to be done.  In the chapter called Show Business Gutenberg compares paintings to hookers, doing their jobs up close, one customer at a time...can you stand it?  He is right, of course.  Seeing art is a solitary experience, and the painting must entice, caress, or firmly grab (depending on the customer).  I am going to give the gaggle of queens in my studio a lecture on safe sex.  

This piece emerged from a large piece of stained and battered reclaimed wood.  My aching muscles wanted someone to carry me around, so who better than an awkward giraffe?  The trouble began when he wanted to enter the house.  That's another story entirely. :)