IT IS FINISHED

It is with great relief that I report that the painting is finally complete, and I am finally leaving Rossland.

After many iterations and changes, the final painting looks like this:

It is currently stretched over a bent piece of plywood, which is why the image looks a bit fish-eye-lensey at the top. You will all happily note that I am ambiguously clad, and that a hand (holding a ski pole) is covering my naughty bits. I believe this painting falls partly into the creepy and off-putting nude category, and partly into the vain and self-obsessed commissioned work category, which at this stage I'm happy to take. In fact, right now I'm happy to take anything that means I can get out of Rossland and get back to climbing.

I'm being a little harsh on Rossland. The biggest problem is that I'm a bit crippled and I've been trying to avoid any real activity so as to give things time to heal. My finger is heaps better and I'm confident that I can ease it back into climbing. I've also hurt something in my ankle which is not getting better as desired and is quite displeasing, but hopefully a change of scenery (and leaving the hostel, where doing anything requires at least one flight of stairs) will sort it out. It doesn't help that there's construction work on the main street right outside the hostel, and the sounds of clanking and jackhammering accompany my every waking moment here.

Now I am left with the tricky problem of storing the painting. I'm not sure whether to hang it in my old house, leave it with Brad, take it with me, or try to get it put up at Powderhound. I feel like the painting is ready to go out into the world and do its work, so I'm hesitant to hide it away in storage. Ideally, I'd like to hand it at Powderhound, my old work. This would ensure that legions of customers could be creeped out by it and would ensure that my legacy of indifferent customer service could continue long after I have left the store. However, my boss (who has the misfortune of looking quite a bit like me) will probably object to my idea on the grounds that it runs contrary to his goal of running a profitable and reputable business. I can't seem to find him right now, but when I track him down I'll see if he's keen.

I could also hang it in my old house. Since the house is currently unoccupied, and the door is unlocked, this would be logistically simple. Plus, the next inhabitants of the house (which could quite possibly include me next season) would get to enjoy the painting without any explanation or context which might mitigate its effect. To do its best work, the painting should appear to be an unowned object, but one which still appears important and deliberate. I cannot guarantee, however, that the next inhabitants (or indeed the owner) of the house will not throw the painting away.

Perhaps the most sensible thing to do would be to mail it to German Anna. That would ensure that the painting is extra awkward and inexplicable for people who see it. I could also take the painting with me, but it will just stay hidden away while I mooch around until I stay somewhere with enough wall space to hang it, and I don't know when or where that will be, or who will be there to judge me unfavourably when they see it.

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.

What makes a house feel like a home?

Yesterday I moved out of the hostel where I’ve been living for a month (it was free – I’m not one of those sad people that lives in youth hostels. At least not any more...) and into a house right in the beating heart of Rossland. One of the doors in the house opens into the pizza shop, and I’m right across the road from the main pub. It would actually take longer to have a pizza delivered (since they’d have to walk around to the front door) than it would to just go and pick it up, which is not something that most people can say that about their house.

One of the many odd features of this house is the number of empty picture frames hanging on the walls. They give the house a slightly derelict air and of course we’d like to fill them during our stay here. Now I was going to give you the long and detailed explanation of what I want to put into the picture frames and why, but it occurs to me that this idea is so excellent that it should simply by allowed to stand on its own. It ought to be judged on its merits as an independent concept, rather than the product of some kind of mere historical process.

A tasteful nude.

Yes people, a tasteful nude. Ideally it should be of a man, it should be black and white, it shouldn’t show any really rude bits, although perhaps a bit of butt-cheek would be OK, and it should be unclear whether the photo has been taken by a profession or simply a dedicated amateur. But we don’t want something smutty or crass. This is all about taste and class.

At the moment I’m a little unsure about what approach to take to make my dream a reality. There are several obstacles. First off, I’d need to OK this with my housemates. I have considered the possibility of simply taking said tasteful nude, placing it in one of the picture frames and insisting that it has been on the wall all along, and that no-one has noticed. The risk with this approach is that it might be difficult to get the image I’m after (see below) without making it somewhat obvious that the picture hasn’t been on the wall all along, and if I got caught doing this I’d be seen as something of a weirdo. So, assuming I want to get the housemates on board with this plan, I need to explain to them how the whole thing will work, and I need them to share the joy that I would experience from having such a picture in a public place in the house. There is a risk in this, because if I explain it to them, and they don’t share my enthusiasm, then I’ll look like a weirdo. To further complicate matters, there is a language barrier. Two of my three housemates haven’t arrived yet, and the one that’s here now has good English, but perhaps not good enough English to pick up the subtleties of this particular plan. Again, there’s a strong risk of looking like a weirdo.

But, let’s say that I manage to get the housemates to buy in to this project. There are also some genuine difficulties in getting the right image. What we’re aiming for here is something that will make any guests who see it uncertain as to whether this is a status item that suggests pedigree and culture, or whether it’s a rather creepy and slightly homoerotic photo of one of the housemates. I’m sure the internet is teeming with photos of naked men, but once you narrow it down to the tasteful ones it’s going to be a much smaller pool. And then within that pool, you don’t want something that’s too arty or slick. If it’s a genuine tasteful nude that some beret wearing New York photographer has taken it won’t be any fun at all. Finding something that’s just the right balance of legitimate and creepy is key here, and the internet is a difficult place to find that kind of thing. Also, to find such an image, I’d need to spend days looking at naked pictures of men on the internet. No thanks. So then, we’d need to actually take the photo. This is ideal in a sense, because it guarantees the kind of creepiness we’re after. Plus it means that the photo will be of someone in Rossland, and if possible, we might be able to make it just obscure enough that people think they recognise the subject without being sure. In any case, this is a difficult balance to get right.

Finally, we must print the photo. This is also a bit delicate, because getting caught printing a large-format nude photo that you’ve clearly taken yourself in some kind of commercial printing place is another obvious foray into weirdo territory. That said, I’m sure there’d be a way, and if not, I could always do it in a nearby town that I’d never go back to again.

In all honesty, the biggest hurdle is getting it OK’ed by the housemates. If I can get that done, I’ll be well on the way to creating something special. Wish me luck people – I’ll keep you posted.