
I'm sure we've all had the experience of being asked to donate a piece of work for a fundraiser for a gallery or artspace that wouldn't actually show our work in a million years. I once bid on my own piece at one of those auctions, because I really liked it and didn't want it to get away.
This one was for a gallery here in Calgary; the theme of the auction (upcoming some time in February) is "Hot Gossip". When doing a piece for a fundraiser you try and make it more sale friendly than perhaps you'd do otherwise, so I used the currently popular blues and pinks...which morphed to greens and oranges, I couldn't help it. I used "birds and branches", as is being done to death right now...and threw in a cow skull as a tip of the hat to the whole Cowboy Aesthetic thing. And yeah, with the title I'm kind of mocking the sort of art these galleries show.
And then I decided I liked it. So I'm keepin' it. It's only the second Calgary Specific piece I've done (the first, donated to a fundraiser auction, was a dinosaur painting which did actually make it out of my studio). Next subject: Oilwells. Oh yeah.