Painted with apologies to Michael Taylor, the British artist who painted “Boy With Apple” for the movie “The Grand Budapest Hotel”. In the movie, the painting was central to the plot as a priceless stolen masterpiece by the fictional painter Johannes Van Hoytl the Younger. — according to the AI description on Google (shown below).
“The Grand Budapest Hotel” is one of my favorite movies and I get my kicks from bastarding famous paintings. I’m a jokester. At first I thought I’d turn it into a self-portrait. But as I got into it, I wanted to keep the same haughty expression as the boy showed. And those fingers! The only hint of self-portrait that remains is the long hair.
And of course I wanted to change the background, making it more like “my world”. That’s a spider plant I’m babysitting for a friend who winters in Florida. Orchids, from Home Depot, seem to love it here. In the lower left there are a two cats. The black & white one on my lap is my beloved Picasso, rescued as a baby kitty from the middle of the road 16 years ago. The gray one in front has one of those intense, mystified (horrified?) gazes every cat-owner out there has surely seen: the cat seems to be staring at something. Spooks? Here, the cat is gazing at small, glowing orbs…
The background is what my studio looks like. It’s winter now, and out the window a bizzard is raging. Wind howling, snow on the cedars and tamarack branches. In the upper right are some seashells from my vast collection, including a conch shell that I blew as I trudged along the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu back about 1994. Above that are some masks, including that of a snarling werewolf. I always stick it on the passenger head-rest in my car around Halloween.
And finally, on the lower right is a proud cat, a freshly-killed mouse in its jaws. Plenty of mice here. I go through lots of mousetraps every year. The dead mice get tossed out the door, where grateful possums snatch them up during the night. And notice the mink “throw”. I happen to own one of those things, snagged years ago at Goodwill. It reminds me of all those Sunday mornings in church many years ago, staring at women who wore minks in the pew ahead.
OK — that frame: a fabulous find from a thrift store. Only $3!
Margie Guyot Art 