A quick trip to the southerlies of California brought me to this vista in search of a similar but different scene I’d painted for a friend a few years earlier. Apparently after some flood damage their place needed extensive work done and movers were hired to take all the necessary belongings out and store them while the work was completed. Not everything made it back though, the painting was “lost” along the way. Good taste, shady movers… that’s all I have to say about that. That original painting was also one that I never got a really good photograph of, so it’s double hard to see it go like that. But that’s neither here nor there.

Well it is here, this is the spot I chose for the replacement painting of the one gone missing. It’s right in front of one of those Sotheby’s mczillionaire ocean front homes. A realtor was showing it while I painted. I wasn’t much in the mood to talk to them, though I sensed the group behind me chatting and watching while I ignored them and sang badly. After they’d left the realtor came back and interrupted me to chat with a bit more intention. Turns out the couple buying that house wanted the painting. Now my friend who I was doing this for wouldn’t have minded if I sold this one and painted another, but in my mind I’d been wrestling with this painting for Pancho, not for some yahoo investor couple that would just as likely call the police if I walked up to paint near their house in the future. I told the realtor it wasn’t for sale. It wasn’t.

Some might say I should have offered it at some inflated price because of, you know, oceanfront zillionaires and all, but I wouldn’t anyway. I ask what I ask because it is fair. Games are for kids. I love what I do too much to play chutes and ladders with my livelihood. That game was never any fun anyway.