Monday, March 2, 2015

The Vigilante and The Jazz Singer

The title of this week's blog sounds like it could be a good story, full of justice, angst, drama, and love, instead of just the titles of the two featured paintings of the week.



We're coming to the end of the blogs covering my older paintings.  Last week, I wrote about the last of the pre-2012 paintings with "Please Stay on Trail", so the next two blogs, will cover the remaining paintings of 2012, and following that, the new paintings will begin being released sometime right around the first day of Spring.  And the trivia contest with answers coming from this series of blogs will start then as well!

I told the story (in the blog featuring "The Duel") of a guy we rented a room from in Montreal, and how he was perhaps, the absolute worst roommate/landlord on earth:  constantly knocking on our door, complaining that we didn't hang out with him enough, a constant flow of strangers he'd invite in off the street to come hang out with him in the apartment, always leaving the front door open or unlocked, blasting music, throwing dirty rags in with our clothes in the washer, and on and on, we finally had had enough, and started looking for a new place to rent.


It's pretty difficult to anger me, but for the last several weeks that we were in that apartment, I was just wanting to punch this guy in the nose, pretty much all the time.  Looking back though, I can say that living with this unbelievably annoying man, actually helped me to get a lot of painting done, as I would spend as much time as possible locked away in our room painting, with head phones on listening to music, so I couldn't hear him knocking.

I painted the first 8 of 16 paintings, and most of number 9, while Michel and I lived in this apartment:
"Wedding Cake","The Mermaid", "The Pirate", "The Ring Master", "Cherry Blossom Bride", "The Duel", "Apple Picking", "Autumn Wedding", and most of "Winter Wonderland".  Before we moved though, I sketched out the three Hispanic/Mexican themed paintings of the 2012 series:  "The Mariachi Band", "Flamenco" and one of this week's featured paintings, "The Vigilante".


I'm not really a gun person, though my parents both raised me to be a crack shot.  Something we would do every year was to save our bottles, jars, and cans all year long, and on Christmas morning, after we unwrapped the gifts and had breakfast, we'd head to the gun range out past the old dump.  We'd spend hours just shooting all the bottles, jars, and cans we saved all year.  I haven't fired a gun in ages, outside of a paint gun at a bachelor's party a few years ago.  I grew to be a really good shot though, and had gun safety deeply ingrained into my brain, but I dont really know a lot about the different kinds of guns.  I honestly cant tell you whether the guy in "The Vigilante" is holding an automatic, a semi-automatic, or whatever it is.

Originally, I was going to paint him holding two, old fashion style mexican pistols, but on the particular day I was sketching this out, our roommate/landlord was especially annoying.  He came pounding on our door, telling us he decided that we had to leave the apartment at the end of the month, which was about a week away.  The reason being we didn't hang out with him enough.  We had already started looking around for a new place to live anyways, so the idea of moving didn't bother us too much, we just wanted to give him a standard 30 day notice.  He infuriated us both by being such an ass, that we didn't care about being nice anymore and said we'd move out.  20 minutes later he came banging on our door again, saying he changed his mind.  We're pretty sure he had figured out he wasn't going to be able to afford this apartment by himself, and we were the only other people who were renting one of the rooms at the time.  There was another room in the apartment that was empty most of the time, as the longest anyone else was able to stand living there, was around 3 or 4 weeks.  We didn't care that he changed his mind back, we left anyways a few days later.

I was so mad at this guy that I decided to calm down by working on sketches.  The pistols I started with in the sketch of "The Vigilante" weren't menacing enough to match up with my mood, so the pistols were erased, and I sketched in the type of guns I saw guards down in Rocky Point walking around town with, during a vacation I had taken there several years prior.  And then I added the bullet belt, because I was just that mad.

Michel and I looked at many different places over the next couple of days, but finally found a great room on the west side of Montreal with a nice woman who wasn't planning to rent out her extra rooms as quickly as we needed, but after hearing our story of the man we were living with, she decided to get us in right away, instead of making us wait until the following month.



The new neighborhood was beautiful.  Where we lived before it was right in the middle of dowtown.  Lots of traffic, people everywhere, noisy, but it was awesome, because we were in the middle of everything.  Being on the other side of Mont Royal, in Monkland, we were living on a really quiet street, with big beautiful trees everywhere, wildlife....  basically a cute little village.  We got ourselves set up in the new place quickly, and felt the stress of our previous living arrangements just melt away.  I split the days between exploring this new part of the city, and painting, while Michel was at work.  I put the finishing touches on "Winter Wonderland" and then did "The Mariachi Band" and "Flamenco".  When I started on "The Vigilante", I started to switch the new sketch back to him just having the two old pistols, but instead decided to keep it as I had modified it to, to remind me of the old apartment, and decided the next painting would represent the new apartment.

I never had a roommate before in life, until I started dating Michel.  I bought a piece of crap house when I was 19, and immediately starting tearing it apart, moving walls, vaulting ceilings, building additions.....  someday I might even finish it.  Remodeling a house you're living it complicates things, and it gets even more difficult to work on, when you work in the same house.  Never enough time for everything.  Through all this though, I never had a roommate.  It was definitely an adjustment when I suddenly had to live with roommates.  The first one was the stuff that nightmares are made of.  The next one, much better.

She was a jazz singer, and music teacher.  She kept odd hours, but so did I.  I'm a horrible insomniac, so she and I would often be in the kitchen, chatting in the middle of the night.  Another guy moved in a few weeks after us, a school teacher.  We all got along pretty well.  One night she invited us to come see her perform at a Jazz Club, where she was going to perform with just a pianist, and a stand-up bass player.  We said we'd love to go, and I started picturing what it might look like, and made a couple of sketches.

When we got to the jazz club, I quickly saw that I had over romanticized it.  The stage was tiny and crowded in amongst the tables, and none of the performers were as dressed up as I imagined.  The show was pretty good though, Michel and I both enjoyed it.  I considered changing my sketches to better match the actual show, but decided I liked my version better for the next painting.  The only thing that did change, was when I first started painting "The Jazz Singer"; she was originally going to wear a red dress.  As I started painting it though, I decided to change it to the deep purple.  You can still see a bit of the red peaking through around some of the edges of the dress.




















We only lived in this apartment for a few months, and then I had to come back to Arizona.  Michel was supposed to come back to Arizona with me, but ended up having to remain in Montreal, and moved in with a friend of his he once shared an apartment with.  Before I left though, I finished up three more paintings, which I'll write about in the next blog.



The background for the painting, and the petroglyph in the foreground of "The Vigilante" are based on Tucson, AZ.

Prints of all the paintings shown here in this blog are available at the webstore <click here>. 


It is INCREDIBLY helpful in getting my artwork out in the world, and is greatly appreciated. 

As a little thank you to those who've been reading this blog, when I start releasing the paintings in the third week of March, I'll be beginning a trivia contest, asking questions that you'll be able to find the answers to in my blogs.  There will be more details coming in March. 

If you have any questions you'd like to ask that I can answer in a future blog, you can either post them in the comment section below, or send them to my email  dizzybear73@gmail.com  



















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