The Day After Thanksgiving

It's the day after Thanksgiving, so we've been busy this morning setting up our few Christmas decorations including a small tree with lights, a snowglobe, and some holiday candles. We also pulled out this familiar little metal top from Grandma Jessie's. Luke is big enough now to know how to make it work, and besides putting it in his mouth, I think he's got the idea! I love the way he flicks his little fingers to make the top spin!

Speaking of the day after Thanksgiving, last year I was in a Humanities class, and we were studying different styles of art, including Surrealism. We had to do a project where we make a piece of art in one of the styles, so I decided to do a surrealist painting in the style of Rene Magritte. You'd recognize his paintings in a second (the guy in a bowler hat with an apple over his face or the pipe with a plaque reading, "This is not a pipe"). Anyway, I had a dream a day or two earlier where I was sitting in the parking lot at Carrabba's and I had my backpack open with books spread out all over. Someone came up to me and started talking to me, and while I was distracted, another woman stole my wallet from my backpack. I remember that there was a lot going on and a lot I had to do, but because my wallet had just been taken, all I could think about was trying to get it back. So that's what I painted. The man in the bowler hat looking at a giant canvas where the only thing visible is a wallet with a pair of wings, flying away.

Of course I commissioned Dad to help with the painting. We had a great time, the day after Thanksgiving last year, drawing sketches of our ideas, studying lots of Magritte's paintings to see what themes he used , mixing paints and cleaning brushes in the fishbowl, taking a break for leftover turkey and potatoes with gravy, turning up the music really loud in the studio and whistling along with it and loving it all. We spent almost the whole day working on that painting. I had bought three canvases, so I painted my own version while Dad did his own similar version (same subjects and colors, but leaps and bounds more technical and artistic). Here is a picture I took of my painting (which has been sitting on our mantle, above the fireplace since we moved to Texas):

We painted the background and sky first. The clouds came next with the giant white canvas. Then we painted the trees that look like individual leaves. We finished with the main character, the man in the bowler hat who represents the artist, and the flying wallet. Dad spent so much time on his that he didn't finish that day. I asked him about it later, and he told me he had since finished his trees, and all he had left was to paint the man in the bowler hat (himself) and the stolen wallet. Unfortunately, Dad passed away before he ever finished the painting. His painting and mine look very similar except for that one striking difference: his painting is missing the artist, and it will remain unfinished forever now that the real artist is gone. I hope to frame and hang my painting with his unfinished painting someday to always remember the attention he always gave to his kids. I'll never forget that day after Thanksgiving 2008 when Dad and I spent the whole day together, doing something he loved so much.

(It was his idea to have me sign it like Magritte signed his paintings in the bottom right corner, but slightly modified: "Mark-ritte.")