Questionable Paintings

Last week I was given two months of work full time. That news was very fortunate, however I will not be going on vacation anywhere now. And while I am quite happy to have work, I was also looking forward to the trips I was thinking about, so now I need to buy some happiness. This time I've been relooking at art.

Back in middle school one of the artists I liked was James Christensen. At that point in time he had just released his first book called Voyage of the Basset. I remember seeing his art crop up here and there. I used to get a jigsaw puzzle catalog and some of his works were in there, I even ended up getting one. And there was a mall in Cleveland where I remember seeing several of his porcelain figurines in one of the art galleries. And then Fr. Franks had the book itself on his desk, and since all of kids pretty much adored Fr. Franks whatever he was interested in automatically made us interested.

The art itself is varied. Sometimes he goes classical Renaissance and other times he is more fantasy oriented. I tend to like his fantasy oriented work, although in general I do not like the fantasty genre. Yesterday I called up Brittany to ask if she had heard of him before but she hadn't. But also apparently Mom had called her to tell her about this artist. Mom must not have given Brittany a good impression because the conversation went like this. "You need to grow a pair and get man art. Hang up some naked ladies." "The art I have up is fine." "I'm going to get you a bunch of Playboys." "First off we don't talk about Playboys (same reason we don't talk about Bob Evans), and second off I wouldn't know what to do with them." "Fine, I'll get you Maxims, they're classier anyway, and you put them in your bathroom of course." "What's wrong with what I want?" "You aren't going to put up art with a bunch of fairies flying around." "Oh, I never thought of it like that. I don't think of these things." "You need more 'Machette', just think of what he would do and do that." "Well he balances things out." "No stop with the balancing." "I think people just need to warm up to it." "People should not have to warm up to your homosexuality." “You’re right. Good points, I won’t get the art.” But this morning I decided to show her three samples of the artist. She wrote me back and said that she actually liked them and had no problem with them. And that’s what happens when people doubt me. Mom apparently gave her a bad impression based on a vocal description of the art, but doubting my taste is just bad form.