The Peacock107

 "My first efforts were some really bad abstracts.  Then I tried my hand at birds starting with an acrylic rendition of a couple of hyacinth macaws on poster board.  One of the two women I lived with thought it was great.  But it was really terrible, so after some lame attempts on canvas board, I switched to stretched canvas.  I bought a bunch of canvases, different sizes and experimented with different series, abstracts inspired by the coloured iris of the human eye, motif abstracts based on the Jerusalem cross, and random birds.  It was one of the last of the bird series, a composition of nine hyacinth macaws, that seemed particularly good.  Apparently, Diane, the gogo boy's girlfriend, found an architect putting the finishing touches on his fancy new hotel in Richmond.   He saw an image and decided that he wanted three more just like it, but with different coloured parrots.  It was a commission made in heaven.  In about a month I knocked off three paintings of variously coloured parrots, red, green and multicoloured.  The pommy Brit architect loved them.  I got paid, and went on my first trip to Costa Rica.

"Pommy Brit?" I ask.

"He was quite a snooty piece of work, with a very clipped public school accent, more Queen's English than the Queen herself.  He kept insisting that each painting had to be a clearly recognizable image from the other end of the corridor.  So, I quipped, that even if it was the Mona Friggin Lisa hanging there, it would be so far away that no one would know it.  Little lord Fauntleroy took offense, so I let Diane handle it from there.

"It was a most odd and awkward phase I was going through.  I was still living in Christian community with both women, Dianne and Doreen, and it was a difficult and challenging arrangement, since we were all essentially incompatible, but for our common call to serve Christ and the most destitute together,  Yet here I was, suddenly a working artist and getting all the closer to the world of high culture and other ridiculous people.  And the two ladies were simply nonplussed, since I was no longer the meek humble  Christian they had so erroneously assumed me to be...."