10/3/09 Alpacas More Fun Than Painting, Working on “Seam”

Visitors

Visitors from Texas

There were seven visitors in total.

Saying goodbye

I had every intension of painting but kept calling the bodyguard and delaying the time we were to hook up because TPM’s rancher friend came through with a trailer full of alpacas en route to Texas.  It was pretty funny having these visitors in an apartment building.  We threw out the alpaca poop, along with our kitty litter, in the building’s dumpster out back-it must have weighed over 60 pounds.  We took the animals out of the trailer and paraded them around the building.  People came out of the woodwork to get photographed with them.  The ranch hands loved it having discovered alpacas were better chick magnets than puppies.  The weather was stellar and I had to get going.  I finally got to the painting site around 2PM after the Texans left.

At the site my bodyguard was in a good mood because he took time to help his girlfriend’s daughter out.  We exchanged the high-five because we had been debating as to what he should do about the girl and he did the right thing.  He told her to get birth control pills because her mother was not having that conversation with her and the kid has a boyfriend at age sixteen.  My bodyguard actually felt his girlfriend wanted her child to get pregnant in order to get more money from welfare to do drugs with.  He spent an hour and a half, with her and her mother as well, talking to them about the seriousness of sex and birth control.  I could tell he was proud of himself.  He knew it wasn’t ultimately his responsibility because it is not his child.  However, he recognized a child in need and did the right thing offering advice–hoping to give her a chance that he himself never got.

The groundskeeper, Tony dropped by again today to check up on us.  It is always nice to see him.  As a young man, he used to work at the site when it was up and running.  I asked him to give me a tour as to what all the machines did.  So much is missing and has been scrapped that it is hard to figure out the process.  He said the room I was painting in didn’t operate on steam but rather electricity that heated up ammonia that ran through all the pipes and worked the other machines.  He said the factory made its own electricity at one time but that all the engineers have left and no one knows how to work anything anymore.  He said it was like his car that talks.  His car has a computer in it, which even tells him when the pressure on his tires is low.  He has to take the car into Chrysler whenever it asks him to.  He says robots now run the world and all he does is watch the world evolve and fly by.  Then he looked at my painting and told me that no one does what I do either.  He says that millions of kids come through snapping pictures and putting them in their computer, but what I do is obsolete.  I asked him if he thought I should bag painting and he replied no, that I love it. But then he reiterated how unusual I was and said that nobody can do what I do.  I did tell him I would be willing to teach him but he didn’t reply.

I am mostly working with little brushes at this stage of the painting and trying to gain greater depth by bringing up the level of detail in the front.  I’m also tweaking color.  It is so dark I can hardly see what I’m painting today.