My sister sent me a jpeg of a painting recently completed for her client with a story I promptly forgot. Most of our conversations are spent outdoing each other — silliness and weird voices, funster stuff and imitations. Then you can't really remember details because it all blends together like jambalaya, and that it was pretty filling even though you can't recall one thing in particular.
All I remembered was that there was an older woman who cried when she saw the portrait. And that an older photograph served as a model for this piece. And that my sister tried to hurry the air drying with a hair dryer. Which you cannot do with oils, but she still tried. And something about the paint developing a yellow cast — or maybe it was the addition of a quick-dry coating that made the paint yellow, which is bad. And that my sister spent hours the day before retouching the yellowed painting to prep it for the presentation, the next day. And maybe that's what I heard, that the woman would cry if the painting wasn't done.
But here's what my sister sent to me when I asked her to retell the story:
"Here's the painting of the family I told you about. The girl in the center just turned 16 and her parents took her out on the town to teach her how to smoke and drink. They weren't aware she was pregnant and she didn't know they were filing for bankruptcy!
Just kidding, they were a happy family for a long time.
My friend will present her mother (girl in the center) with the portrait for Christmas."
Then she signs it "love, oil on canvas 11x14'"
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