Monday, September 5, 2011

Painting in the Park

I returned from a fabulous trip today, fresh from visiting family in Seattle and new (to me) friends in Whidby Island in the Puget Sound.  I'm dealing with jetlag - we returned on the red-eye flight via San Francisco - but wanted to continue working on fast a-la prima portraits.  It was a beautiful day, and I found Shane, who was playing great jazz in Rittenhouse Square with a good trumpet player behind him, so I painted him using my limited pallet:

Shane in Rittenhouse Square: 6x8" oil on prepared paper
On a break, Shane came over to see what I'd been doing, and fell in love with the painting.  He offered to give me half of what he'd gotten for his playing in the park for it.  I was glad to give it to him just for his playing, but he needed to come back for it later as it was too wet to handle immediately.  He did, giving me some money for it and also two beautiful bank notes from Zambia:  One is for One Hundred Trillion Dollars (Z100,000,000,000,000!  Inflation, anyone?) and the other for K100 (One Hundred Kwacha). 

I think I've set a new record for the value of a one-hour painting!