Ferris While – Finished Oil

Oil on canvas, 18”x24”. I have been wanting to paint this picture for two years.

I started this over the weekend.

Details. The boardwalk will be time-consuming. I need to define a white picket fence and line of people from the Ferris wheel to the ticket booths center-right. I wanted to finish this by tomorrow, but I’m feeling more like another week. I will add medium to the paint for detail from here on out.

I painted my kids so their faces can’t be used for an AI-image generator. I was using Midjourney the other day and got freaked out by the realism of a generation. It was a real kid’s face with gentle ray tracing. It looked photographic, and who is to say that an arguably stunning facsimile AI-image, like a meme, takes on an arbitrary life of its own and starts dragging my kid’s day-to-day social interactions through rough territory.

I was lucky, maybe. People always quoted and sung this song to me.

Do you have any idea how weird that is? I found out from an acquaintance in middle school that his dad, Joni, and Janis Joplin got black out puking drunk at his house during a party when he was a young professional. He was a judge. So, the specter of a raucous, puking, trigger-happy gum-chewing, guitar-biting musical prodigy singing to zombie prep school children about some dude offing his cheating old lady with readily available and cheap handgun. The gift of music was what gave me nightmares at night. Classic radio 96Rock in Atlanta with Rick Dees…in the morning. Incidentally, he had Top 40 hits with a songs “Disco Duck” and “Eat My Shorts”. The spirit of this song is in this painting.

I am now moving to fine detail. They say God is in the details. Great. That’s all I need, more drama. More drama on a dark and stormy –

– I knew she was trouble the moment she leaped into the room with that ball of yarn. She was the kind of woman that cut her sandwiches diagonally, and I thought maybe I should help her. Cut sandwiches. She offered me some ‘nip. It was only 5:35 pm in the morning. Why ask why?

– nameless gumshoe

Why her, why now? Who was she? And why was I suddenly dry and covered with a light coating of sour thrush from [redacted] years of drinking nothing but rain barrel guaro and fermented horchata with smelts and turnips?

I have a name you know. It’s Walter Br-

I gave my kid a blue slushie. This is the way.

Switching him to black spring water boosted with octopus adrenaline. I traded a Friday afternoon to work on delivering the best decorative amusement park ride picket fence I could.

I articulated the rollercoaster as if it were the skeleton of a long snake. I worked on the benches and deep background.

The spokes will require I practically repaint the entire sky, which is fine. A gradient of blue hues from violet to baby blue would give this hush puppy some smoked mullet of glory, indeed. I used a palette knife to split the paint strokes into cylindrical lines.

The cars will drag this project into a third day. Hopefully finished by Monday. Thanks for visiting.