Additional note on dearth of posts...

Sometimes when the painting goes badly, so goes the blogging. And Hey Joe is going, I think, by any set of metrics (a word I loathe, by the way), badly. But tomorrow is another day, and Sundays are always good for squeezing a little paint on a religious icon.

This is Chris Ofili's painting of the Virgin Mary. It's a bit notorious because, in addition to squeezing paint, he squeezed some elephant dung onto the painting too.



If you think that Irish woman was voted off American Idol because Middle America is uncomfortable with the lyrics of "Jesus Christ, Superstar" (a notion I find preposterous on one level and totally understandable on another), you can imagine how hard the shit hit the fan when they found out what Ofili was using to paint the Virgin Mary.

The fact that those little paired round things that seem to be floating around the painting are actually cut-and-pasted pictures of asses didn't help matters.

Me? I've never seen this particular one in the flesh, but I've seen several other works by him and he is a beautiful painter. Or, rather, his paintings are often beautiful. I can't speak for the man himself.