Blog

For decades my parents had a framed poster in their guest bathroom.  I think they got if from someplace like the old Spencer’s shops that acted as most malls’ premier crapatoriums.  It was a typewritten list of various collective nouns for animals, starting with “A Crash of Rhinoceroses” and continuing for some 30 or 40 species (“A Parliament of Owls,” anyone?).  It was the conversation piece of all conversation pieces, even if it did lead to cocktail party guests hopping up and down in the hallway waiting for the previous bathroom user to finish reading the list.

This led me, years ago, to create “An Ostentation of Peacocks,” and to every few months or so add a new one to the collection.

The newest, looking suspiciously like the cover art of a children’s book, is “A Loveliness of Ladybugs.”  What makes these fun, I hope, is the laundry list of other collective nouns for animals that wander across the image.  I can pretty much guarantee that whoever purchases this, frames it, and hangs it in the bathroom will also experience decades of houseguests hopping up and down in the hallways waiting for the previous user to stop reading and get off the pot, as it were.  And if that’s not a sales pitch I don’t know what is.

As you can see, there are dozens of possibilities for future additions to the collection.  And new collective nouns are coming into existence every day.  Unfortunately, I’m baffled as to how I would illustrate the latest one: 

An Alternate of Facts.

This is the story about the first painting to be sold off of this website.  It’s a two-parter.  Not in the sense of your only being able to read the first half now and a sequel next week.  Rather, there is some background about the title and other information about the painting itself.

BACKGROUND

We love our backyard fire pit, which has been the site of many a pleasant evening with friends sipping wine, roasting marshmallows, and solving every one of the world’s problems in scintillating conversation.  I can be, however, overkill in my enthusiasm for it, as evidenced by January 2016, when my brother-in-law and I enjoyed a “snow fire” during a blizzard.  It was GREAT. 

It WAS great, that is, until the heat from the fire melted the snow accumulating on our clothes.  When the temperature is in the low 20s, sitting and letting your clothes get soggy is not even remotely wise.  Don’t believe me?  Put a wet wool sock in your freezer for 10 minutes and then use it as a scarf.  Still and all, we had a lot of fun and it makes for a happy memory.

THE PAINTING ITSELF

Richmond has mild winters.  Snow is rare but it is not unheard of, which means when it does happen the following does as well:

• Weather forecasters begin announcing pending snow one week before the event with gradually increasing hysteria, which means that
• Grocery stores run low on milk, bread and baby food, and completely out of beer and potato chips, and
• Schools close, usually until the following month, while
• Everybody drives like a complete jerk, except me.  (Which is what everybody else thinks too, especially the dolts who don’t understand that four-wheel drive is not particularly useful for stopping).  Finally
• 90 percent of the citizens LOVE it, while the rest grumble like pre-conversion Scrooges contemplating a Salvation Army kettle ringer

Joy regarding snow events in Richmond is especially felt by my painting friend Courtney, whose excitement about capturing a snowfall in a painting is on par with that of a Jack Russell terrier when a meatball hits the floor.  Just a couple of weeks ago, she painted a beautiful one of the Fan neighborhood before the snow stopped falling.  And through the magic of social media we were with her every minute of the process. 

So I took up the gauntlet and worked on a snow painting of my own.  Snow is a challenge, of course, being just plain white.  But it is lot of fun to paint.  And what better subject than our fire pit?  After last year, though, the idea of a snow fire is a non-starter for me.

Which is why the painting is called “No Fire Today.”

I usually adopt technology just as it becomes obsolete.  For example, several years ago I finally upgraded from a VHS tape player to a DVD player only to discover that online streaming had became the thing.  Meaning our DVD player has been used fewer than a dozen times, usually to play "A Christmas Carol" every other year.*

Hopefully, starting a website for my art will not represent the same phenomenon.  Do websites still exist? Do people use them?  Or am I supposed to Twitter this to Facebook using an Apple Watch?  Or is Facebook a thing of the past?  Who knows?  I know that Twitter is still something because politicians, at least one, famously use it to express misspellings with multiple exclamation points to factory managers and actresses.   Trying to figure out how to hashtag artworks in one hundred characters using bird sounds, however, is beyond me.  Consider me old school, but when you get right down to it a webpage is a darn friendly technology to show, and view, things which are visual.  Except to my mother and mother-in-law, both of whose ideas regarding new-fangled technology rarely involve electricity.  Still, the rest of you:  ENJOY!

I hope to present new articles - blogs - on a regular basis.  If all goes well, some will be funny.  Others informative.  None should be so long as to tax the reader, especially as some of you will be reading them on your phones (presuming, of course, that some hitherto unknown technology will not be zapping everything by osmosis directly into your brain - at least long enough for people to find the technology indispensable before it is inevitably discovered to cause deadly whim-whams in the anvil bone in the middle ear).  

Your feedback is welcome.  Even if you feel you must tweet it to the "worst artist ever!!!!  Sad!!!"

*The good one, with Alistair Sim