Evening Sky (Oil on Canvas)

When I was a kid, about one weekend a year there would be commercials on a local TV station for an event called something like “Starving Artists Show” or “Starving Artists Marketplace” or something similar. I think it was like a planned, traveling event and the pitch was that this circus-like business would try to sell/move/unload “paintings by internationally known artists, at hundreds of dollars below the retail price!” So it was maaaybe real art, by real artists, but probably the kinds of artists that paint the same scene or image over and over again? I don’t rightly know how it worked exactly, but I think it was a way for product (art by artists in a stable of artists) to be moved by, well, a kind of Art Pimp. I wish I knew more.

Regardless, this is a nice painting. So nice in fact that either A) we’re very very very fortunate to have it, or B) it’s too nice; suspiciously nice even. So nice that I think it’s not done by a real amateur non-commercial non-mass-producing type of artist.

But: it’s SOOOOO WEIRD. Black. And Orange. And Yellow. It’s UGLY, in a good way, but not it a Brutalist kind of way. I’m having second thoughts now. This has GOT to be amateur art. No sane person would pay good money for this from a professional artist. But a sane person WOULD pay good money for this from an AMATEUR artist. I hereby declare this to be “A)” Final Answer. 

To the artist: nice work, bud!

Postscript: see 8/19/23 (“Hut on Lake or River”): same artist? Not sure. Definitely amateur if so. This is what the (V)VAG is all about. Excelsior!