The Very Few Paintings I Made in 2008
Couldn't sell this at the Borek Art Show, so Doug Deegan took it off my hands.
Sold at the Borek Art Show
Given to a Breast Cancer 3-Day fund raiser (for my friend Jessica Carilli)
When this painting didn't sell at the Borek art show, Zeus came up to me and asked if he could buy it. I was keen to take it back to California because I wanted to retouch some of the paint that chipped off (see yellow stripe) and I wanted to give the rich La Jollans a chance to buy it from me for a couple hundo. However, Zeus was super stoked on the painting, so I gave this painting with the words, "if you want to pay me something, you can pay me whatever you think is fair".
The last 30 minutes of the last day I was in New Jersey for that trip (a few days after the art show), Zeus met me at the Avalon WaWa so he could give me a couple bucks for the painting. He insisted that we meet during the last couple minutes before I drove to the airport, even though I was going to be back in a couple weeks for Brian Pellini's wedding and he could just as easily have waited until then (when I would have totally forgotten that any money was going to come to me for this painting). I guess he really wanted to give me some money for the painting.
There we were, hanging out in a WaWa parking lot... not the first time we'd hung out in a WaWa parking lot. More like the 1000th time.
We talked about life, about the cool fold-up bike I was riding (Tom Serwatka's "boat bike"), about getting Zeus some real work, about me moving back to NJ. It wasn't how I imagined my last conversation with my old friend.
I had never imagined a last conversation with an old friend.
A couple days after Zeus died, John DiGenni was in Zeus' apartment and sent me a cell phone photo of this painting hanging on the wall. Not on the floor. Zeus had hung it up (or maybe Libby?) soon after he got it from the art show. I think that the moment I got the cell phone photo was the hardest moment of a hard week. Hit me deep inside my chest. Still does.
