painting – shoutforjoy.us

Polo & the Art of Negotiation

When I was eight years old, our family went to Fort Snelling during their restoration preparations for their big sesquicentennial in 1969. We were only six years early. They were already selling memorabilia to help pay for it. While we were there, we witnessed a polo game. It was the only time in my life I have done so. My mom grew up with horses, so this was mandatory. Lawyers had not gained as much of a foothold by then, so fans just sat on the grass, with no barriers between themselves and the field. Polo matches were rare, so there were no stands. When a ball got so nicked up that it was deemed too poor to continue in play, they would simply knock it to the sidelines.

A ball came hurtling out of the field. I went racing toward it. So did another boy. Now I was pigeon-toed and never that athletic, but I threw myself on that painted cork ball! I nabbed it fair and square! I took it home and found that it had a special charm. I placed it in a drawer of my maple desk with the Masonite drawer bottoms. When I opened that drawer, the ball would roll around and the divots in the ball would make the most interesting sounds and resonate in that drawer. For 12 years, I kept that drawer empty except for that ball, just so I could roll it around to make that special sound.

My mom never understood this special delight. Countless times I would come home from school and see a huge trash bag outside the back door with things from my room in it. Before entering the house, I would retrieve my polo ball and a few other choice possessions, then take out the rest to the trash. I would then enter the back door. I would holler, “Mom! Did you clean my room?” She would answer, “Yes.” I would say, “Did you throw anything out?” She would say, “No.” I would say, “OK.” And I would return the polo ball to its drawer. My mom had cryptic methods of education. Looking back, this was probably her way of training me for politics and negotiations. I am now 64. My mom has been dead since 1993. I still have the polo ball. Sadly, I don’t have the maple desk with the Masonite bottomed drawers.

One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish!

Last week marked the 116th anniversary of the birth of Dr. Suess (Theodor Giesel). I took this as inspiration to paint four more fish for our bathroom in our little rented apartment. I had already pasted the four fish that I painted last year on the walls above around the tub in the new place.

I decided to paint four more fish in the rest of the bathroom. These are all discus fish, from the Amazon River basin. They are painted approximately life-sized. They travel in schools of variegated colours. I paint the canvas the colour of the wall before I paint the fish, because the fins and tails are partly transparent. I use clay based wall paper paste, so I can remove the canvas at any time. It remains water-soluble indefinitely.

Drop-in Customer

A couple of weeks ago, John came to the door of our apartment. He said he lived here for four years and just wanted to see what we had done with the place. He saw some of my paintings. He asked me if I took orders. I said that I could. I rarely received any. He proceeded to take his Deadhead badge off his jacket pocket. I told him he could probably buy a nice print for cheaper than I could do a painting. He wanted a painting. We arrived at an agreeable size and price. He asked me to paint a couple of roses with it, on a 14″ square canvas.

I had a hard time getting to it. My heart was not in it. Don’t tell the Grateful Dead I copied their trademark. Of course, I will gladly pay their artist the customary 7% royalty on profits for sale of copies of their work. I wonder if they collect on all of the tattoos and car stickers. Anyway, I finally got to it yesterday and finished it today.

I have never painted using primary red, white, and blue, before. I think I understand why they are used for so many national flags: France, Britain, Russia, Norway, US, Australia, Norway, the Confederacy, etc. Red and blue are from opposite ends of the spectrum. They clash with each other. When they are set next to each other, the line where they meet can look like it is moving, because the frequencies of the light reflecting are so different. Intersperse some white for contrast and the red and blue look even brighter than they would otherwise. It is an exciting combination.

So, I didn’t charge as much as I should have for how long it took. I probably shouldn’t have done it at all. I’m not particularly proud of it. I think John will be happy with it. All in all, it has been a good experience.

Tricky Chicky strikes again!

Last summer, as I was painting the Birds of Perkasie mural, many people stopped by to say Thank You. A few even left gifts and cards on my chair or among my paints for me, including cash. One lady left a birdseed bell with a note. She signed it “Tricky Chicky”. When I was around town or at the pool, people recognized me and said Thank You. Perkasie is a friendly community.

Yesterday, we received an envelope decorated with stars and and stickers. It was addressed “For the beautiful bird painter”, to our former address (the site of the mural). The mailman knew who it was for and got it to our new address, on Ridge Ave. It contained a card, decorated with bird stickers, that read:

Hello, Mr. Bird Painter!
I got you this gifty for the holidays but never got it in the mail so I’m sending it for Valentine’s Day instead. That’s probably more appropriate anyway because I love your beautiful bird wall! Yay! You lit up your little corner of the world & I appreciate it so much!
Thank you!
tricky chicky

Enclosed with this card was a $30 gift certificate to The Perk. My wife and I went there for lunch, today. It was a real treat! Since we moved and I have had so many health issues, we haven’t been able to pay all of our bills, much less go out. We each ordered about $9 meals, so we could leave a proper tip with the remainder. The food was excellent and generous portions.

Thank you, Tricky Chicky!

My Mac desk chair

Just after we moved into our current, slightly larger, small house in the middle of last month, we purchased a wooden table and three chairs for $50 through an online yard sale. The chairs are simple, sturdy, solid wood kitchen chairs. They were built for durability, not for comfort. We are using one for at the desk in the living room, one for a guest in the sewing room, and one for at my Mac computer which I use for editing photos.

I painted the living room chair Brazilian Tan. I painted my Mac chair Sunny Yellow, Cerulean Blue and Orange. It is part of my Perkasie Fun-A-Day 2019 home decor project.

Perkasie Fun-A-Day 2019 – Days 12 thru 23

I have continued to hang my artwork, paint, and organize in our little house, each day. I painted another Discus Fish on canvas and pasted it on the bathroom wall by the sink. I painted a portrait of our friend, Tony, and hung it in the sewing room. I finished painting our cat Skittles’ eyes, and hung the painting in our bedroom. I also hung the rest of the icons in the sewing room.

2019 Fun-A-Day, days 10 & 11

On the 10th, I painted two more Discus Fish and mounted them on the bathroom wall. I actually finished painting them today, after I realized I had forgotten to paint their side fins. No big thing. It was just a few strokes with a fine brush using three colors of paint. Then I hung my 6″ x 6″ painting from Day 13 of last year’s Fun-A-Day on the wall next to the toilet. It is of a yellow Butterfly Fish. The title of the painting is Hope #13 Biodiversity.

I also arranged more of my paintings in the back entry room, over the freezer and on the outside of the furnace room. I hung most of them using Velcro Command Strips, since this is how I hang them at art and craft shows.

2019 Fun-A-Day, days 8 & 9

During my nearly 20 years in the Antiochian Orthodox Church I became an iconologist and helped a few iconographers install icons in several churches. I also edited photos of icons, printed them and installed them in an iconostasis for a mission church. I learned how to apply to and remove painted canvasses from walls. I, in turn, instructed several other iconographers how to do this. By now, you are wondering what this has to do with Fun-A-Day.

On the first two days, I installed painted canvasses that I had originally painted for and installed on doors in our former, rental house. Yesterday and today, I painted and mounted a Discus Fish on our bathroom wall. I intend to paint several of these in various colors to mount on the walls of the bathroom. The first one took a good bit of time, with the research, sketching and painting. The rest should go more quickly.

All of the paintings on canvas were pasted to the wall with clay based paste. They will lay flat and tight to the wall until I want to remove them using warm water, a sponge and some rags. They will leave the paint unharmed.

Scott

Scott was a good friend of mine in junior high. He was on the ski jump team. At Theodore Wirth Park, there was a huge, wooden ski jump. Next to it, was a smaller jump built into the hill. Scott would be there, training with his jumping skis. I would be skiing on the downhill slopes on the park board slopes on the Saturdays I couldn’t get away to Wisconsin, or after school. One Saturday, Scott found me and let me use his jumping skis on the smaller jump. What a thrill! He tried to coax me to go off the big, wooden jump. I knew I didn’t dare. The likelihood would be I would jump off the wrong side of it. Another Saturday morning, Scott finished with his jumping practice. He had forgotten to bring his downhill skis and didn’t have a ride home until later. He found me and persuaded me to share my skis. He let me use both my poles. He just used a single downhill ski. He taught me how to ski downhill on one ski! That was a useful skill. The rope tows were a little tricky. I would end up slowly wilting to one side and pull all of the other passengers on the line down with me into the snow.

Scott was a beautiful boy, and charming. He had a fort he had built behind his house. In the summer after 8th grade, guys and girls would hang out at his house. Couples would use his fort to make love. I was not aware of this until my girlfriend told me it was “our turn”. I declined. I was caught completely off guard. That ended my relationship with that redhead. That was OK. I am so glad I waited until marriage.

During junior high and into high school, Scott was one of those who called me on a few occasions contemplating suicide. My sister, Sue Ann, and I, it seems, were known as the suicide counselors for our junior high. How that came to be is anybody’s guess. All I know is that Scott and I spent time talking, listening, crying, laughing, renewing a reason to live.

We went to different high schools. The night in 1972 in our junior year when Scott killed himself, he did not call me. It still hurts. Scott was the fourth of my friends to commit suicide.

(You may purchase this painting on my art sale site: www.shoutforjoy.net )

Monochromatic Hero and Suicide

On Sunday, I painted my first monochromatic painting. It is an 11″ x 14″ acrylic on stretched canvas of André Trocmé in burnt umber. He is one of my heroes. That turned out so well, I followed it on Monday with an 11″ x 14″ painting of Bobby Glaeser in phthalocyanine blue. Bob was a classmate and neighbor of mine growing up. In early December 1974, a year and a half after we had graduated high school, he killed his parents, his younger sister Ann, and himself, with a 12 gauge shotgun.

André Trocmé was a Huguenot pastor in southern France. Before and during the Nazi occupation of France, he led his city and the neighboring city and surrounding countryside to give refuge to Jews fleeing Hitler’s genocidal death camps. It started with the boarding school his church ran. He did not believe in discrimination, so the school accepted Jewish students, who wore the school uniforms and lived lives indistinguishable from the Christian students. It grew into families sheltering families. He trained them on how to blend in and how to respond to the authorities. They set up an underground railroad to help families escape from France to safety in non-Nazi occupied countries. No one in their network betrayed a refugee into Nazi captivity. His nephew’s class was raided, where he was teaching a few dozen Jewish children. The Nazis seized the children to take them to a camp. Trocmé’s nephew insisted on going with them, as their teacher. He died in the concentration camp. It is estimated that they saved over 3500 lives.

I read Pastor Trocmé’s story over 30 years ago. It was also made into a movie. As always, the book was better. He had corresponded with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and with Gandhi. He was a pacifist and had a strong ethical belief in honesty, charity and non-discrimination. He never made excuses for having to lie to the authorities. He felt that it was still sin, but to tell the truth would make him complicit in the deaths of fellow human beings, which would be a greater sin. He had been taught a hard lesson by his strict father, when he was a lad. He learned that it was not only right to do good; “it was essential to do the good on time!” It was his position that Hitler’s rule, the rise of the Nazis, and World War II was totally preventable, if only people of good conscience in Germany had done the good on time. Once he and his cohorts were in power, it was too late to stop him without doing evil and causing death and destruction. This is an important lesson and one that America needs to heed today.

We have both major parties putting forward the most despised presidential candidates in our history. Both are bigots. One is a capricious fool; the other is a shrewd politician committed to endless war. One would incarcerate Muslims and Latinos here; the other would (and already has) kill Muslims, Latinos and others overseas. They have 30% acceptance rating between them from the electorate. Yet people are deciding their votes on fear of one or the other, instead of doing the right thing and rejecting both.

It is time to do the good on time.

Bobby was a good friend in grade school and junior high. His family lived two blocks away from mine in Golden Valley, Minnesota. We would bicycle together, sled and skate together in the winter, and sometimes camp out in our backyards together in the summer. He was a beautiful boy! He was handsome, with thick, dark hair, athletic and smart. All the girls loved him. Most of the boys wanted to be him. He did not appreciate all the attention. He was shy and became more withdrawn in his junior and senior year in high school; to the point of not allowing any pictures of himself to appear in the yearbook. This painting is based on his two pictures in the 1971 Robin. The pose is from the soccer team’s group shot, but his eyes were closed, so I looked at his yearly picture for details of his face.

The last time I saw Bobby was in the spring of 1974. I was visiting a few of my friends at the University of Minnesota’s main campus. At that time Pioneer Hall was for both men and women; every other room for each gender. I greeted Bobby as he darted stark naked from the showers to his room. I was shocked at this, not because of modesty, but his apparent lack of it. He had changed, and changed radically. Early December, 1974, we heard the news that Bobby had shot and killed his father, his mother and his sister, Ann, then himself, with a 12 gauge shotgun in the middle of the night in their Golden Valley home. A neighbor discovered their bodies four days after when North Memorial Hospital called her to check on his father, because he had not showed up for his on call assignment. He was a doctor.

Bobby’s case was written up in a feature article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He had suffered some sort of mental breakdown prior to this and had been in treatment. He left the treatment and had been alienated from his family. They reached out to him. He was home for dinner that night to discuss re-entering treatment as an inpatient. After they had all gone to bed, Bobby got his hunting gun and shot his parents and his younger sister while they lay in their beds. Then he shot himself.

The four of them had a joint memorial service at Valley of Peace Lutheran Church. Their were four, beautiful Christmas wreaths on stands in the front of the packed church. Pastor Stine gave this horrible message. He said, “Heaven is God’s gift to us at Christmastime. Bobby gave his family their Christmas gift early.”

I got up, then and there, and walked out of that church! What an ass! This was the same ignorant pastor who had kicked me out of confirmation class one month shy of completion for asking too many questions about heaven and hell, and how one gets to heaven, after my best friend, Steve Rainoff had died by falling through a skylight, chasing a soccer ball, in a locked school in New Jersey.

In the spring of 1975, the Mpls. paper had a feature article on Angel Dust. The authorities had just seen a rise in its use. The symptoms of its use and long-term effects sounded just like Bobby. I have always wondered if he could have been exposed to that, and that is what changed his personality so never know.

I painted his portrait in monochromatic phthalocyanine blue, from a happier time in his life. Bobby was a beautiful boy. He had all the advantages. That could have been me.