Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Sunday Afternoon at Pepper Mills Lake
Sunday, I was at Pepper Mills Lake with my easel and paints, trying to
make an ironic painting. Which never really works, for some reason. But I
was trying anyway.
I just think it's funny to see these self-important people with their designer jogging gettups walking their designer dogs, leash in one hand and a bag of poop in the other. It's so fashionable. Makes me think of the woman with the monkey in Seurat's Sunday Afternoon at La Grande Jatte.
One person after another came up to look at the painting and ooh and ahh over the dog in the picture.
"Oh look, Susan, it's a Shih Tzu. It looks just like Teresa's Princess."
"You're right, it has the same markings and the same bow. But that's not Teresa!"
"No, that's not Teresa. Who is she?" wondered the first woman.
I explained, "I just make people up."
"I don't recognize her," Susan said.
And one after another in the same way. None was aware that I was making fun of them with the pretentious woman, the pretentious dog.
At one point, I had the woman in the painting smiling, but apparently it was a very false looking smile, and this made a number of passersby angry.
"Who does she think she is?" they would ask. "Barb, who is that woman? I don't recognize her!"
"I just make people up," I'd say.
They'd stand there for a few minutes, dog on a leash in one hand, a bag of poop in the other, sparring looks with the woman in the painting and trying to figure out what label manufactured the jogging outfit I'd invented, and then they'd move on.
A feminist professor critiqued the painting and demanded to know the gender of the Shih Tzu. There wasn't one but on the fly I decided it would be safe to say the dog was a male. That made her very angry with me, I prefer not to speculate why.
Most of the time, the men ignored me. Every 15 minutes or so a guy would ask me if I was getting any dates, always thinking that the joke was original. A couple gentlemen and one lady showed interest in my technique and congratulated me on following my vision.
A dog tried to pee on my easel leg.
Finally one young couple came by and laughed. That made me feel good. And then a woman on a bike stopped and asked if I had felt it necessary to include the "doggie bag" as she put it.
"Why not?" I said. "There’s an etching by Rembrandt illustrating the Good Samaritan. In the corner of the print, there’s a dog deficating in the gutter. I think I'm in good company."
"Oh, whatever," and she rode off annoyed. I like to think she was still thinking about the painting as she passed the people walking their designer dogs along the cement lake path.
A woman stopped by and asked if she could commission me to paint her dogs. So tomorrow, I have an appointment at her home in Glennshire Chase.
When I got home to my apartment, I made the announcement. "Everyone, I have great news! I'm going to be a dog painter!"
Of course I live alone, but I amuse myself, and that's all that matters.
The painting of the woman and the dog is drying. Perhaps I'll post a picture of it.
I just think it's funny to see these self-important people with their designer jogging gettups walking their designer dogs, leash in one hand and a bag of poop in the other. It's so fashionable. Makes me think of the woman with the monkey in Seurat's Sunday Afternoon at La Grande Jatte.
One person after another came up to look at the painting and ooh and ahh over the dog in the picture.
"Oh look, Susan, it's a Shih Tzu. It looks just like Teresa's Princess."
"You're right, it has the same markings and the same bow. But that's not Teresa!"
"No, that's not Teresa. Who is she?" wondered the first woman.
I explained, "I just make people up."
"I don't recognize her," Susan said.
And one after another in the same way. None was aware that I was making fun of them with the pretentious woman, the pretentious dog.
At one point, I had the woman in the painting smiling, but apparently it was a very false looking smile, and this made a number of passersby angry.
"Who does she think she is?" they would ask. "Barb, who is that woman? I don't recognize her!"
"I just make people up," I'd say.
They'd stand there for a few minutes, dog on a leash in one hand, a bag of poop in the other, sparring looks with the woman in the painting and trying to figure out what label manufactured the jogging outfit I'd invented, and then they'd move on.
A feminist professor critiqued the painting and demanded to know the gender of the Shih Tzu. There wasn't one but on the fly I decided it would be safe to say the dog was a male. That made her very angry with me, I prefer not to speculate why.
Most of the time, the men ignored me. Every 15 minutes or so a guy would ask me if I was getting any dates, always thinking that the joke was original. A couple gentlemen and one lady showed interest in my technique and congratulated me on following my vision.
A dog tried to pee on my easel leg.
Finally one young couple came by and laughed. That made me feel good. And then a woman on a bike stopped and asked if I had felt it necessary to include the "doggie bag" as she put it.
"Why not?" I said. "There’s an etching by Rembrandt illustrating the Good Samaritan. In the corner of the print, there’s a dog deficating in the gutter. I think I'm in good company."
"Oh, whatever," and she rode off annoyed. I like to think she was still thinking about the painting as she passed the people walking their designer dogs along the cement lake path.
A woman stopped by and asked if she could commission me to paint her dogs. So tomorrow, I have an appointment at her home in Glennshire Chase.
When I got home to my apartment, I made the announcement. "Everyone, I have great news! I'm going to be a dog painter!"
Of course I live alone, but I amuse myself, and that's all that matters.
The painting of the woman and the dog is drying. Perhaps I'll post a picture of it.
Posted by Marc Clemens at 1:00a.m.
Story continues below.
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Drooling Bassetoodles
Glennshire Chase is a rich hamlet in the country and my customer is the first property as you enter the village. You round a curve in Route 97 and you can sense it coming. Everything seems manicured. The woods, the riverbed. The water seems cleaner. Even the roadkill I’d followed all the way seemed to be conspicuously absent from the pavement as I approached their property.
But the sounds of the country were not sweet. Since the duct tape has fallen off my driver’s side window, I could hear the sounds of dogs barking, and even, I thought, howling. That was my first sense of foreboding.
When I got out of my car, the barking jumped up a notch, like an alarm being set off due to the noises my car makes. The door has been replaced and the new one doesn’t fit quite right into the body. When you open it, the door snags the front fender and bends it in until it bends far enough to snap back with a bang. Stepping out of the car, my heel always manages to hit the metal trim that’s peeled away and that makes a nice, reverberating twang. Back in the day, that combination of sounds would have set off car alarms in the parking garages, but today I was setting off the dogs.
My customer was coming down the walkway to meet me. "Hush!" she admonished the dogs, and one or two stopped barking. The rest carried on as before from within the huge, fenced-in area of kennels.
“Come on in,” she invited me.
She welcomed me into a grand foyer and several animals ran up to me. She explained that they were Basset Hounds, and told me their names, which I forget, and told me not to mind their excessive salivating. Then a couple fuzzy beasts, about the same size, came gamboling in.
“The Bassetoodles don’t drool as much,” she said as one of them shook its head and showered me.
“What kind of dogs did you say they are?” I asked, crouching down to pet them, pretending to show interest.
“Bassetoodles. Basset hound and Poodle. Everybody wants a hybrid these days.”
“Wow, that’s something” I said, wiping slobber from my hand, only to find that my pant leg was no drier.
“A friend of mine crossed a Basset Hound and a Saint Bernard,” she said. “Now that dog could drool.”
As I stood back up, I could see that she was waiting for something to dawn on me and when I pictured the size difference of the two parent dogs she sensed my awe and smiled with delight. A disturbing delight. Like she was flirting with me. This was my second sense of foreboding.
I’m not a big believer in mental telepathy but at that moment I was projecting the thought to her with all my might: “No, I don’t want to know which was the female.”
Still flirting, she said, “oh, come around back and look at my Pocket Puggle.”
“There’s a sentence never before uttered,” I thought to myself. But of course, I was wrong. People around here probably say that all the time.
This was becoming tedious. We were entering her kennel and I realized that it was filled with designer dogs. She introduced me to the Puggle named Pete. Peter Pocket Puggle for long.
“But he’s an anomaly around here,” she explained, oblivious to the fact that in some places her whole brood are anomalies.
“Here’s our main area of focus. Poodle hybrids. Everybody wants a little someone with some Poodle in her! We have Cavoodles, Labradoodles, and Boodles.”
“Why not just a Poodle?” I ask naively. She’s got an answer.
“Oh, they’re just too fru-fru for the men. Get a nice Lab for the guy and a little poof-ball for the lady and mix it together for a happy marriage.”
I want to see this lady’s self-help shelf. No. No, I don’t.
“These are all part Poodle?” I asked. Even the word Poodle was starting to sound funny to me and I wanted very much never to say the word again. Not that it is the Poodle’s fault. The only reason they are fru-fru is because of the topiary-like haircuts. With their entire coat intact, they look fine. Like sheepdogs.
“No, we also crossbreed with Yorkies. We have Norkies, Morkies, and Chorkies. And of course we have Yorkipoos.”
Of course.
Bassetoodles, Norkies and Yorkipoos? Where am I? In a Dr. Suess book?
Posted by Marc Clemens at 1:00a.m.
Story continues below.
Saturday, March 30, 2013
Update on Painting the Dogs
The other day, I went back to the customer's house to take pictures of the dogs as reference images. She took me into the kennels and was introducing me again to the dogs in the front whom I'd met before. Just as we were ready to start shooting, my customer was called into the house. Something about a shipment of sperm. So she said, "Just start here and keep working your way around, Marc. I should be back before you get through this side."
Naturally, she was expecting me to start shooting pictures of the Labradoodle and move dog by dog from cage to cage.
But I was inclined to treat the kennels as I would an art show. The first thing I always do when I go to an exhibition is take a quick walk around the entire space. I like to take in everything and get a feel for the show as a whole. I like to see what immediately catches my eye. After my short jaunt through the galleries, I return to the front and examine each piece closely.
So I took a quick trip around all the kennels and sure enough something did catch my eye. One dog, in the back, was paying close attention to me. It was quiet and noble. It seemed to be following my thoughts as much as my movements. I walked up to the cage and the fluffy creature seemed, more than any of the other dogs, to want attention from me.
"They really have evolved to desire companionship," I thought to myself as I opened the door and went in. I knelt down and was petting the dog and marveling at her golden yellow eyes when suddenly it clicked. I stopped petting the dog and studied it.
"It's part wolf!" I whispered. "It's a Woodle. You're a Woodle, my friend!"
With that, the dog took off through the open door and was gone.
I looked around for a safe place to put the camera, almost choosing the dog's soft pillow, then thought better of it and sticking my head and arm through the strap, attached it to my body like a machete and ran after the dog.
But my friend the Woodle had not made it far. She'd stopped in front of a large kennel that was just a little removed from the other kennels. She was staring into it through the bars. I walked up to the kennel slowly and looked in. But there was nothing inside. I was just noticing something about the floor when I realized that the dog was sitting perfectly still and I had the chance to reach out and take hold of it's collar and lead it back to its cage. I knelt down beside it and was about to reach out when I heard my customer calling.
"Marc, don't move," she said calmly but with a chilling seriousness that succeeded in stopping me. "She won't respond well to being held."
"Sorry," I said. "She surprised me when she ran out."
"Yes, her father was quite an escape artist, too," said the lady tragically. That's the only way I can describe the way she said it. Tragically. As though it just came out of her mouth, like an involventary sigh, without her realizing she was going to say it. As though it was waiting to get loose, just like the Woodle. I got the sense that I shouldn't admit to suspecting the breed.
We took pictures of all the dogs except Ulva, the Woodle. My customer told me that Ulva was going to have a new home soon. I didn't question this, though it made no sense. "Aren't all these dogs going to another home at some point?" I wanted to ask. I got the impression that Ulva really wasn't going anywhere.
By now I was depressed. I was feeling the horrible, nagging feeling once again that I was getting wrapped up in something I didn't need to be doing. Another distraction. I was already feeling a premonition that I wouldn't earn any income from this experience. I felt doomed and I felt sick for pretending to be a capable dog portraitist.
I got a new wave of enthusiasm later in the evening, however, and spent the night drawing dogs from the pictures. In the morning I got a call from my customer. Her husband had arrived back in town from a business trip last night and told her that his sister, whom he'd visited while in D.C, had just taken up painting as a hobby and he felt that they should give the job to her instead of me. Something about it didn't sound quite right, but my customer apologized and said she'd keep me in mind and recommend me to her friends, etc. She didn't offer me any compensation for the work I'd done so far, though.
Looking back on it now, I know what was odd about that kennel that Ulva was staring into. The floor was newer cement.
I wonder what happened to the wolf. Or wolves. I wonder what they did. I wonder what's hidden under that floor.
Posted by Marc Clemens at 1:00a.m.
