A painting of my friend Ed's Vespa scooter I've been working on for about a year, off and on. Kept thinking I wanted it to be more than just a pretty picture. I've done some things in the past that incorporated collage and type, perhaps from my graphic design days. I did paste-up a few lifetimes ago and remembered liking how my desktop looked when all the elements were there but not assembled yet. You could get the same message just looking at the pieces, but it was an enjoyable exercise to put them together mentally. I suppose the intellectual art term for this would be deconstructivist. So, I went back to my piece and added some collage elements. The scooter painting satisfies the part of my thinking that likes rendering stuff, and the collage adds a quirkiness that makes it less predictable realism. The last part was adding the word "Vespa". I didn't like how it looked so I started sanding it off and was struggling with it a bit so I stopped. I looked at the texture from the sanding and realized I liked the way it looked and all of a sudden it wasn't the problem I thought it was. The word was still legible, so I decided to leave it that way. One of those rare occasions where I let something spontaneous happen instead of being determined to get to where I would have normally gone--completely sanding off the word, repainting the area, and redoing the type in a different way.
