Ending my sabbatical with a short prayer...

My sabbatical is over. I'm reporting one day early, for no other reason than to offer a short prayer:

Good Lord, please don't let Donald Trump buy part of the Mets.
Amen.

Plus there's this:



Which leads, inexorably, to this:



Which is certainly problematic. But aren't they all problematic when you first start flinging the paint?

The only good part, relatively speaking because it's a bit of a problem at this stage too, is the purple blur that spans both canvases. Called, from left to right, "Mr. and Mrs. O (Barack)" and "Mr. and Mrs. O (Michelle)", they are being painted on commission as a pair, and I like the idea of the unifying visual element of the purple haze as well as the fact that their eyes are meeting (sort of).

Feel free to start sending in annotations. Certainly something like "Eat your fucking vegetables, Malia!!!" deserves to be scrawled on the second painting.

As they say in theater, dying is easy; comedy is hard. Or something like that. In this case, Barack is easy; Michelle is hard. For the record, I'm using this image as the resource photo:



Which is a stunning image. I hope I can do her justice.

"Eat your fucking vegetables, Malia!!!"