Summer is always rough. It's soul sedating humidity and not enough tourists and locals bullshitting about one or the other of these topics. Every summer I feel a scramble and I SCHEME. One year I went up to Burlington Vermont to sell on the street there. One year I went out to CA to trim. This year I went to Virginia for 2 weeks to visit my family. To commemorate my mothers 60 years on this planet I compromised my artistic-metaphysical pretensions and painted a simple bowl of fruit that MATCHED HER KITCHEN.  (This is a service I offer ONLY to the person who birthed, bathed, read to me at night & cleaned my boogers off the wall.)

This is actually a painting of FAKE fruit in her kitchen. (see? metaphysics always creeps in...) This was a fascinating thought, albeit a morbid one on my mothers birthday...thinking that this painting doesn't necessarily give away it's plastic immortality.. once we're all dead and gone and this painting makes the rounds of Colonial Beach yard sales who's to ever know that these apples & pears never really did LIVE? No birth, no growth, no rot, no grounds for an empire of fruit fly hell.
To paint it I actually mixed water color patched and held them up against the coloring of her wall (which is yellow). I warmed the yellows so they'd come 'at' you. I snatched little brick a bracks from her shelves to match the reds, though they still ended up a bit purpley (but purple is complimentary to yellow sooo.....) All of this effort should indeed secure my position as most beloved child. (That I live so far away and cannot pop in to do my laundry also probably secures this position.)
    Back home in New Orleans I immediately implemented my most recent SCHEME. I  sublet a friends space in the Quarter and tried to turn it into a temporary art space.

Ah...NEXT summer...the ultimate SCHEME. Until then, I'll just do this:

I didn't get any sleep, stayed up working on a big painting. Around 6 AM I figured, it's the Royal Street Food & Wine Fest- there's gonna be people, the artists are gonna be quick! I may as well get out there now to get my spot.

Turned out the street was totally empty. For hours I was the only one set up. It was a day of minor physical mishaps. My pants ripped on the ride down, once arriving I realized I'd forgotten the clothes pins I use to hang my work with. A kindly, talkative canadian lady watched my stuff while I went to Rouses. All they had were obnoxious pink/purple/blue plastic clothespins. Ah well..the canadian lady bought me some coffee & I drank it blinking, trying to stay conscious.

Another artist showed up, she told me about her other job as a waitress. Said she loved the place, the entertainment factors were high, about a wild day last week involving guns & bath salts. (New band name anyone?)

A guy walked by with a cartoon hand grenade tattoo. I stopped him and asked, "Why would you get that tattoo?"
He stopped and looked surprised. With an enthusiastic gesture he said,
"It's me!"
"What do you mean...internally you identify as a cartoon hand grenade with eyes?"
"No! It's ME! I'm the giant hand grenade down the street!"

A lady who works at a gallery near by came over & bought this piece:

And even left me with a gift of their own work:

This crowd stayed in their 'designated' area. They hardly wandered over. At one point I asked a guy walking by, "Don't you want to engage with us at all?" He said, "No, I don't engage anything." And hurried off in a little bubble. So, yeah.

Then I packed up & rode home and SLEPT & SLEPT & SLEPT.