The Must, Winston St View, oil, 8 x 8, $375.
The Must is a restaurant with a distinctive logo of a blue head with a hole and a wired bottle in it. There was a purchase prize for painting this…but I don’t think they’ve decided on it yet. Anyway, at first I didn’t think I would do it, but the lighting late afternoon was good, so I set up. I was chatting with another participant when a panhandler came over and asked for money. I declined, and s/he? said “huumph, you can afford an assistant but you can’t pay me?!” I tried to explain that he was not my assistant but s/he wasn’t having any of it…and kept muttering, cursing, kind of circling the area and glancing at me without love….so I asked the other participant if he would hang around until things dissipated, which they eventually did. Meanwhile, I hadn’t set the easel up properly so it almost collapsed and that would have meant turps and paint flying everywhere, but because we were on the alert, we were able to catch it in time. I’ll say it again: plein air, not for the faint of heart!