The importance of being Earnest

Remind me to tell you how this ...



Became this ...



But that's not the moral of the story. And there hasn't even been a story, so what's with that?

Anyway, this is about the importance of being willing to make a fool of yourself in public, and the extraordinary benefits derived, tangentially, from doing so.

Okay. Picture yourself in a train in a station. Belay that. That's just the warm-up exercise. Now picture yourself in a train in a tunnel. A subway train. Full of people. Can you envision this?

Okay, so now you take out your iPod, dial up Who's Next, push play and start listening to the first song, which, as everybody knows, is "Baba O'Riley." At the same time, lift your right hand, clench it into a fist, knuckles out, like you were going to knock on a door. The trick is to try to predict exactly when, in the middle of all that harpsichord stuff (legend had it that that Pete Townshend couldn't actually play the harpsichord that fast, so he ended up played it at half speed, then speeding it back up), the three big piano chords come in. The way you do this is by, at the point you believe appropriate, shouting out the words "booooom ... boom, boom." These would, of course, be the chords. At the same time, crack your fist open and pretend to finger the chords on your air-piano.

I guarantee, everybody will look at you.

And this, dear reader, is the importance of being earnest. Sort of. Anyway, the moral of the story is that you can't be afraid to paint a bad painting (see first image--destined never to be "The Annotated Burnett (in the manner of Francis Bacon)") and you can't be afraid to white the goddam thing out and paint a portrait of Lloyd Blankfein over top of the thing.

Yo. Check this out:



This is the whited out version of "TAB(ITMOFB)" with the contrast amped up in photoshop so you can envision the texture.

At one point the thinking was something along the lines of calling it "White Maria" (since it always looked more like Maria Bartiromo than Erin Burnett--just one of the myriad problems the painting presented) and defining the negative/positive space by writing one long, small-font annotation around the perimeter of what would have been her head and shoulders. Something like "I can't believe they fired Todd Thompson for the whole Citigroup/private jet/Bartiromo fiasco and she barely got a slap on the knuckles. That guy from South Carolina should hire her lawyer."

Something like that.

Then people could offer their Bartiromo-directed comments in the usual place. And that, my friends, would really be something.

Although, in the end, we abandoned it. Instead we are readying what we are currently titling "Big Lloyd (Deep Purple)" for exhibition behind Goldman Sachs and the annotations and hijinks to follow. Experienced readers will know not to judge the painting itself yet. I mean, we're just warming up.

But it's coming around.

I'm thinking about whiting out that weird hand thing, though.