Liar, Liar

This is something I wrote in 2010, and just rediscovered.  The drawings were done today, experimenting with computer art.


When I was five or six years old, living in our last home in Los Angeles, I started to develop my social skills. We lived on a street with many other children, and every day was spent playing in groups outdoors. On occasion, we ventured into one another’s homes and compared lifestyles. 

I remember marveling at a bedroom shared by two sisters who had not only their own record player, as I did, but also their own couch and small television. Imagine! A television in a kid’s bedroom! To me this was incredible, a sign of a truly luxurious life. When I expressed my astonishment, asking if their parents really let them have their own TV, one of the sisters replied “of course” in a tone implying that everyone in the world had their own television in their bedroom. 

Observations

I've been painting in the window at Howland-Hughes since the beginning of July, and it's really a great experience. On one level, it's great because it gives me a good-size space in which to work on a large canvas, and because it forces me to paint at least one day a week.

Photo by John Murray of The Waterbury Observer

On a different level, it's great because of the interactions with the public. Children are the ones most likely to notice and take time to look at what's going on in the window. Adults in business suits are the ones least likely to notice or care (they are usually looking at the ground, at their cell phones, or at one another).

Subject Matter

The Waterbury Fire Department stopped by my house yesterday to check for a gas leak.  Two very large firemen in full gear waited upstairs while the third fireman checked out the basement with a meter. We started talking about my art, since my almost-finished painting of rush hour traffic is on an easel in the living room.

First there was the standard polite compliment. The conversation quickly turned into a friendly debate about subject matter and marketability. When I remarked that I have yet to make any profits from painting, one fireman said the problem was my subject, that there is no beauty in Waterbury and thus there is no market for paintings of Waterbury.

I didn't have any other paintings in the house, so I grabbed my cell phone and showed him the detail of my painting of the Welton Horse fountain, which I have on an iPhone case for just this sort of situation.

Waterbury is full of beauty, but I guess not everyone can see it.