Progress Report

Those of you who are looking at the twitter feed will know that after many delays work started the infamous painting yesterday morning. Originally, the plan was to start with a preliminary line drawing on one piece of canvas, then complete the final painting on another canvas frame. Brad already had a big photocopy of my driver's license photo to use to build my face around, but he ended up just drawing it onto the canvas instead of using whatever devious printmaking technique he was originally considering.

Work commenced in the parking lot behind the hostel, and moved into the laundry when it started to rain in the afternoon. Since then, Brad has been painting and napping around the clock, and is currently asleep.

The first iteration of the line drawing. My face is on the top right of the canvas.

During the afternoon, Brad started adding black and white paint to the mix (the original line stuff is in permanent marker), and overnight he started adding blue. Things currently look like this:

For a sense of scale, the canvas is about as tall as I am.

To be honest, the photos don't really do much justice. The details in permanent marker actually give the whole thing a sense of depth and perspective, and it's super interesting to see how it changes every time I get to look at it.

However, a cool painting of me on a chairlift/rollercoaster/ice mountain actually causes more problems than it solves. The embarrassment that I feel over coming to Rossland and commissioning an artist to paint a picture of me using someone else's money is offset by the fact that I'm supposed to be producing a hilarious tasteful nude that will make other people feel awkward every time they see it. While it is undoubted cool to see an interesting painting get made, and I suspect the finished work will be quite awesome, coming to Rossland to commission an awkward painting of yourself with someone else's money is somewhat more vain and conceited than originally planned. And I'm not merely a disinterested or self-interested patron of the arts. I'm also an agent for a financial backer (German Anna) who has a unhealthy interest in making Brad spend time in a room with me while I am also naked and maybe photos are taken.

Brad, on the other hand, refuses to see me in so much as a gauzy, partially-transparent top (not that I have one of those, but it's a mental image the rest of you can enjoy) and flies into a rage every time I mention nudity or nakedness. It appears that I will get a painting, and it will be awesome, but it may not match my original specifications. For a start, there's no tiger in this image. With luck, I will become more naked as the painting progresses, which is something that not many people have had the opportunity to say.

A Patron of the Arts

All the way back in December, when I first moved into my old house in Rossland, I wrote this post about my desire to create a tasteful (but awkward) nude portrait to hang on the walls of my new home. As I explain in the post, I couldn't think of a good way of explaining to my housemates what I was trying to acheive, and in the end I didn't have the courage to suggest this idea to them. The balance between creating a hilarious joke and appearing to be conceited and homoerotic is a difficult one to acheive, and I was not sure that I could explain my idea to my housemates without appearing weird. When I eventually left Rossland in April I assumed that my dream of decorating my house and creating a lasting monument to making other people feel uncomfortable was over.

I did, however, mention my dream of a tasteful nude portrait to one of the other seasonal occupants of Rossland, a diminuitive, unhappy German lass named Anna. At the time, Anna was working five days a week doing unpleasant housekeeping at the accommodation near the ski hill, and in her time off worked as a part-time nanny for a family in exchange for very cheap rent. I pointed out to her that she was not only working a whole lot during a winter holiday in which her main focus should probably have been snowboarding, but that she didn't even need to work that hard because she was paying minimal rent and saving money on other living expenses. I reasoned that she must be saving significant quantities of cash, and suggested that she might be interested in paying to commission the nude portrait I wanted to put in the house, painted by our mutual friend Brad who I worked with during my time at the Rossland hostel.

Of course, when one suggests to a friend that they should spend their hard earned money on a joke that they will be only peripherally able to enjoy, one typically assumes that the friend will not be interested and that the issue will pass away. It was, then, a considerable surprise when I received the following text messages while lounging around in the back of my van a few days ago:

Anna (1/2): "I do not know if you still have this number Sir but I just calculated my budget which I wish I had done earlier because now 400 $"
Anna (2/2): "seems to be totally reasonable for a hilarious nude painting of you :-)"

I should point out that the nude wasn't necessarily supposed to be of me, but if it was going to be a painting I guess I'd need a model and I'm the only one who's realistically going to step up to take that role. So although it was slightly alarming to think that someone wanted to make a nude portrait of me, rather than just in general, I was willing to do what it took to complete the mission. A long and torturous text message conversation followed, in which I ascertained that Anna was serious, and that she didn't actually want to copy of the painting, leaving my free to display it in Rossland. We considered sending it to Maud's Hot Sister, which would have brought two terrible jokes together into a kind of terrible joke supertornado, but the idea was abandoned because then neither of us would see the painting again.

At this moment, I'd like to point out both how unlikely it was that this would ever occur, and how highly this endeavour speaks of Anna's character. This is someone who is willing to commit hundreds of dollars to a joke that she might never even get to see. There is no greater committment to the LOLz than to invest in something you might never benefit from purely because "it'd be a never ending hilarious joke". My efforts to woo Maud's Hot Sister pale in comparison. Thanks Anna, you're quite strange, but you're a star.

With a financial backer, suddenly my opportunity to contribute to the art world was alive again. I tried to contact Brad, but he helpfully doesn't have a phone, and he also didn't feel like answering the phone at the hostel where he's still working. In the end, I took matters into my own hands and drove to Rossland to talk with him in person.

He is not completely thrilled by the idea of painting a nude portrait of me. In fact, he is insistent that I am not allowed to appear in front of him in any state of undress. I can't even "accidentally" waltz past him with a towel wrapped around my waist on the way to the shower. But he does seem willing to paint the picture. Negotiations are under way, and we have a few days to secure an agreement before Anna manages to transfer the necessary funds across to make this a reality. If all else fails, I am willing to approach another local artist who was also not my year six teacher, Jenny Baillie. We share a unique bond because we almost knew each other fifteen years ago, and maybe she'll be willing to help me out if the mercurial Brad changes his mind, or makes it up, or whatever.

So now I am back in Rossland, waiting for money to magically appear from my financial benefactor, and hanging out at the Mountain Shadow Hostel. This gives me a convenient opportunity to get my climbing shoes repaired and give a finger injury some time to heal. Plus I can shop at the most excellent supermarket here.

Those who wish to stay abreast of the developments in this story might want to check out twitter.com/dirt_bags_horan for updates as they happen. Wish me luck.

Primary School Redux

Ever since I arrived in Rossland, something has been bugging me. There's a poster at the hostel that features a painting of Rossland by an artist named Jenny Baillie. When I saw it I thought "Baillie, that's quite a distinctive spelling."

Then I thought:

"I used to have a year 6 teacher named Jenny Baillie, with that same distinctive spelling."

Then I thought:

"As I recall, she was really into art."

Then I thought:

"You know, the way the artist has signed this painting kindof looks like her handwriting."

But of course, it has been a long time since year 6, so maybe I was wrong about the handwriting, or even the spelling. I mentioned this to Brad, my coworker at the hostel, who also happens to be an artist living and working in Rossland. I get along very well with Brad, he's one of the few people I've met in Canada who are comfortable with the jokes I make, and better yet, can give as good as they get. However, I must admit that at times communicating with Brad can be a little difficult. For example, he once in conversation said I was a bus station. I'm not really taking that out of context. We were just talking about something and then he said I was a bus station. It was all a little unclear.

Anyway, Brad said that Jenny Baillie was from Australia, or maybe New Zealand, or maybe even England, that she might have been a teacher, and that she'd come to Rossland maybe 40 years ago, or 30, or 15. Or something.

It appears that Ms Baillie recently bumped into Brad, and it sounds like he may have narrowed down this range to "Down Under", that she used to be a teacher, and that she arrived more like 15 years ago than 40. This is all looking promising.

So, the latest entry on my list of things to do is to meet the Jenny Baillie of Rossland and see if she's also the Jenny Baillie of Hughes Primary School. If so, it would be a crazy coincidence indeed.

And in other primary school related news, it turns out my best friend from Hughes Primary, Parri, is a few hours drive away at Fernie. It's like I'm prepubescent all over again.