I flew back to Northern AZ from Montreal last Tuesday (Jan 6) after getting to experience my first ice storm. That was pretty crazy. Thick ice covering everything: sidewalks, roads, trees, cars frozen to the road, doors sealed shut.... All over the city, people were without electricity, due to trees falling, under the weight of the ice coating them.... On my last full day there, I went to get lunch with Michel who had returned to work that day, walking for a couple of miles on top of solid sheets of ice to meet up with him. It was really more of a controlled sliding scenario than walking. I slipped many times, usually, and luckily, near things I could grab onto to keep from falling. Miraculously, I only hit the ground twice. Hurt my arm a little on one of the falls, but it's feeling better now. I've gotten pretty good at safely falling in the last year, thanks to roller hockey.
After lunch, I popped into a drug store and bought some spikes designed to strap onto the bottoms of shoes. I've only ever seen little old ladies wear them, so I was surprised they had them in my size, but truly glad they had them, definitely a game changer. I was stomping all over the city wearing them, even catching a couple of slipping people while walking around. I was surprised to see as many people out trying to traverse the streets and sidewalks as I did. While I was in Montreal, the Verde Valley (where I live in Northern AZ) received 6 to 10 inches of snow, and it pretty much closed down the area. We're not used to snow here, so nobody really knows how to drive in it, unless they've transplanted here from the north, to get away from the kind of weather we ended up getting here. I missed all of that storm, coming home to only a couple patches of snow left in my yard. I left the shoe spikes in Montreal for Michel to use since he had to stay behind. He loves them, but he's still looking forward to moving to Arizona in the spring, and leaving the Montreal winters behind. It was kind of neat to see people ice skating around the streets and sidewalks of Montreal though, because they could, and it was easier than walking.
I've done three partial winters in Quebec, and they aren't any fun. It was during my first winter up there though, that I met Michel, and experienced my first blizzard too in the same weekend. I'll tell that story in a few weeks in the blog containing the painting "Winter Wonderland", since that painting contains a nod to the day I met Michel.
I've had a lot of people think this week's featured painting "The Duel" is a representation of Michel and I. If anything, it would more represent the man we were renting a room from and living with at the time I painted this. He was interesting, but not in a fun way. His name was Rony, and he was from Haiti. He was unemployed, paid his bills by renting out rooms and collecting handouts. He was almost always home. When he did leave, it would be to run and get food at the corner convenience store, or to "go on job interviews". I happened to be going out one day when he was going on one of these job interviews. We headed off in opposite directions, and when I got a few blocks away, I realized I had left my phone back at the apartment. I stopped, got a cup of coffee at the nearby Tim Horton's and turned around and went back, only being gone for about 10 minutes. When I got back to the apartment, he was in boxers on the couch, yelling at a soccer game on the tv. He'd get all dressed up a couple of times a week, and then just walk around the block a couple of times, telling everyone along the way about his big job interview and then come back home, never having gone to a job interview. Michel and I found it a little amusing, and confusing, that he would go to the pretense of going on these "job interviews".
We only lived there a couple of months, as he was constantly complaining that we didn't hang out with him enough, once even throwing us out of the apartment for it, only to change his mind 20 minutes later. Between the constant knocks on the door to our room to hang out, the constant flow of passing strangers he'd invite off the street to come hang out with him in the apartment, always leaving the front door unlocked, blasting music, always throwing dirty rags in with our clothes in the washer, and on and on, we ended up leaving pretty quick. We only put up with it so long because of the location, and the room was big enough for me to have a large area in which I could paint in our room, while Michel was at work. With Rony always pestering me though, it was a nightmare to work on paintings in that apartment. There were a couple of times a gun would have been handy, but being Canada and their laws against people owning them, I didn't have one. haha. I'm totally kidding, but there were several times I would have liked to have punched him in the nose.
“The Duel” was the 6th of the 16 paintings I painted in 2012. The story of how it came about is a bit less fun that what other people have come up with though. After seeing the movie Abraham Lincoln. Vampire Hunter, I Googled Abraham Lincoln to find out more information about his real-life son. While reading the search results, I noticed a link to the story of Andrew Jackson’s duel, I guess the connection being that they were both Presidents. Whenever I search for something on Google, I always hit the "image" button as well, to see what pictures pop up. That's how the idea for a lot of my paintings come about; the pictures that come with the random searches I find myself doing all the time. There were all sorts of awesome pictures of
dueling on Google, and it just seemed like a good idea for a painting. This is the fastest painting I've ever done. Everything just seemed to flow, beginning to end. The background is simple, there's not nearly as much detail as my other pieces, and yet it is the second best selling image of all my paintings. I've not had another painting come as easy as this one, so far.available at the Dizzybear Creations Webstore
The Duel 5x7 click here
The Duel 8x10 click here
The Duel 11x14 click here
My stock answer for the people that still ask me if this is a painting of myself and Michel, I now joke and say: “yes, 10 years after our wedding.” I really didn't intend for this painting to represent us though, but because of how often it is thought to be us, I'm going to do a painting in the future similar to The Duel, but in the upcoming painting, Michel and I will be wearing the Steampunk costumes we wore to our Quebec wedding. No pistols though, he'll be dueling with a sword, and I'll be dueling with a ray gun, like we both had at the wedding. I'll be doing two different versions, one with representations of us in real life, for personal use and for the invitations of the Arizona wedding, and a second painting, a day of the dead version, with us as skeletons. Cant wait to paint them, but there's many others I have to paint first.
The second painting being featured this week is "Archway Bride and Groom". Part of this paintings history can be found in my first blog, and can be read by clicking here.The gallery that sells most of my artwork and jewelry, Sedona Green, used to be located in a smaller, upstairs location, but in 2009 he was able to move his gallery to a larger, street level location, but in doing so, had lots of extra room to fill up. In the upstairs location, he only carried a small amount of my wares, but while helping him move his store I offered to temporarily fill in all the extra space he had with my windchimes, jewelry, ornaments, paintings, dreamcatchers, and such. Just to help him out and make the store not look so empty, until he could fill the store up with other items. Everything ended up selling so well at the new location though, that he let me be the main artist of his shop, and we expanded my displays.
I had painted 6 or 7 landscapes of Sedona, AZ since that first art show in Jerome, AZ, but found landscapes weren't nearly as fun to paint, nor sell as well. He wasn't a fan of my day of the dead paintings, at first, but let me put in a small display of them, even though he liked the Sedona landscapes I had done much better. The day of the dead prints outsold the Sedona landscapes, by a huge margin.
Since I had so much space to display my work, and the prints of the older day of the dead painting were selling really well, I decided to do a couple of new dia de los muertos paintings to add to the collection. I was wandering around in the town of Jerome, and in one of the store's windows, I saw these cute, little Dia de los Muertos figurines, and went in to look at them. I ended up buying 4 and used these as the basis for four, still-life paintings. That store, Jerome Jewelry, now carries my art prints.
The "Archway Bride and Groom" was the first painting of the four paintings based on those figurines, and was the only one of them that didn't feature a Sedona, AZ background. The idea for having Sedona in the background came about during a conversation with Mike at Sedona Green after he saw "Archway Bride and Groom", and he commented on how surprised he was that the Day of the Dead was outselling the Sedona landscape paintings, by such a huge amount. At the time he really wanted his store to have a heavy Sedona theme, so he was happy to see that the next four paintings combined the two themes, having Day of the Dead figures, with Sedona, AZ backgrounds.
Prints of all the paintings shown here in this blog are available at the webstore.
"Archway Bride and Groom" is on sale this week for 50% off. It is available as a series of specially reprinted, limited edition, hand signed and numbered prints. Limited to a series of only 10.
You can see the other limited edition prints by clicking here or visiting http://dizzybearcreations.storenvy.com and clicking on the "Special Edition Prints" link on the left hand side.
"Archway Bride and Groom" is on sale this week for 50% off. It is available as a series of specially reprinted, limited edition, hand signed and numbered prints. Limited to a series of only 10.
"The Duel" is available in 3 different sizes and is also discounted for one week only.
Two more paintings next week! Thank you again for sharing my artwork/posts with friends that you think would like my artwork, on your social media accounts: Facebook, twitter, blogger, pinterest, tumblr, ello....
It is INCREDIBLY helpful in getting my artwork out in the world, and is greatly appreciated.
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 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.
Direct link to all blogs: http://dizzybearcreations.blogspot.com/
Webstore: http://dizzybearcreations.storenvy.com/
Blog: https://dizzybearcreations.blogspot.com
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Ello: https://ello.co/dizzybearcreations
E-mail: dizzybear73@gmail.com
Love the winter photos Dennis!
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