My son and his family came down for a day at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk a couple of weeks ago.
The kids frolicking by the water like live Flatland beings, like gothic shadows, so iconic.
I really ate a lot. Like the rat at the county fair in Charlotte’s Web. I got kind of hypnotized by the image of this giant dipped cone. The texture so appealing. Memories of eating these as a boy. I scored one and went down on the beach to eat it alone—I’d just bought ice-cream for the kids and myself a half hour before, and it didn’t seem wise to give the kids even more ice-cream already. But I figured I could handle it.
As always the sinister “Swiss Swings” ride made me uneasy.
It was crowded on the Boardwalk, a Saturday, with the slanting late afternoon sun. Kind of 1930s Coney Island photo look to it.
Great ragged silhouettes of gulls.
I bought rayguns for the kids so we could chase each other around yelling. Especially the little boy. And my wife gave the girls a pair of carrot-handled Easter jumpropes.
“Wild West” acrylic on canvas, March, 2017, 30” x 20”. Click for a larger version of the painting.
My most recent painting is called “Wild West.” After doing four cellular-automata-inspired paintings in a row, it was easy for me to go all the way into abstraction. Daubing away, hour after hour, until the colors all looked right. I made the blue things look a little like legs with feet because I my own leg was sore from bicycling. And then I decided they were blue boots and that, come to think of it, the whole painting has something of a Western theme.
The photo above shows me being in the Wild West recently, that is, in Lone Pine, California, near Mt. Whitney, as part of a road trip to Death Valley. I might get a new painting or two out of that trip.
Meanwhile, I’ve done a lot of paintings lately, and I need to sell some to clear up some space in my house. Check out the images, catalog, and reduced sale prices on my Paintings page!