And as long as the hot wet blanket of August makes it hard for me to slap paint, I’m going to do the most funnest thing I can– paint cartoons. Cartoons about suburbia when I was a sunbelt teenager.
My first action as regards this story yesterday was to blast it out to my Upper Left Coast media buddies so that they could heap further well-deserved abuse on the rubes of Florida and add to the merriment of the rest of the nation, who scorn us with unwavering scorn. As is appropriate. More grist for that woodchipper and all. I take pride in being so close to the source and yet surviving, more or less, kind of like dancing on the teeth of an alligator. Or something.
And now, after 36 hours to reflect, I will observe that I am glad that the government of St Petersburg has progressed from slashing the tents of the homeless to the closing of the businesses of the shopkeepers. I predict that in a year or two’s time they will have worked their way up the economic ladder and will be making the lives of the underserving rich miserable. See if they don’t.
At least 2 of the 101 Photos of Roser Park, St Petersburg have been used as references for paintings so far. As I have previously stated, by midsummer my use of color becomes deranged from the heat and I will not return to a reasonable palette until January. This is not really a choice. It is more like a mineral deficiency or something.
So I will just comment that when I paint stuff it tends to get all flow-y, and like that. Not Dali drippy– that stuff makes me seasick– but more like myopia swirly. You know.
There is a pretty good argument to be made that in terms of numbers of deaths and long term social repercussions all over the globe, as well as the misery inflicted over many generations and hundreds of years on millions of people the peculiar institution over which the southern confederacy explicitly seceded was an even greater horror than the European Holocaust of the mid-20th century. And that’s sayin’ something, pal. If this is the case, then displaying with pride a flag of the defenders of African enslavement is more despicable than the flying of, say, oh, I dunno, the black-on-red swastika, for instance.
I have seen plenty of condemnation of the flying of the ConBat flag over Tampa, but little attempt at an antidote for this poisoning of the local atmosphere. Via the Seminole Heights blog, I found this call to artists at the Alley Cats Players blog. Good on them!
The prison-industrial complex has spread into the Caribbean. I saw this sign on a lawn in Old Northeast neighborhood of St Petersburg, Florida. I have friends in the landscape maintenance business, and I feel this kind of competition is just unfair, although I will admit it does alleviate unemployment in the just-might-possibly-be-a-friend-of-a-terrorist’s-chauffeur’s-cousin sector.
And he is a very skillful guy. Out of Orlando, but he is really an old surfer dude from Santa Cruz. His publisher is throwing fragments from his documentary film “Heart of a Landscape Painter” up on YouTube. Like everything on YouTube, it looks pretty blocked up, but at least you get the general idea of what he is doing.
I wanted to do a painting of a Roser Park cityscape, so I biked down into the gulch Saturday morning. It wasn’t early, but there was no one in the park or on the street, not even a dog walker. Probably something to do with the gaspingly high humidity. Anyway, I managed to get some shots without much sweat. I have mastered the art of chewing each bite of air 40 times before inhaling, which makes breathing possible in this climate. Huzzah!
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