Retirement Sunflowers

 I woke up a 3 am and couldn't sleep.  I had this one close to being done, so I just finished it up.  My photos of it are not good.  I didn't set up a tripod and I didn't try to get the light close,I just wanted to document I did this one before I delivered it.  I get some very low prices for my work right now.  Usually donations towards art supplies.  I have one more person I promised sunflowers to and then I am close to done.  When people at work found out I was retiring they asked for pictures. . .  to remember me by I suppose.  People have little idea what goes into painting a picture, the trouble time and cost of materials is not something they would get.  And my self esteem is so low that I am unable to guess how much a picture should sell for, and my empathy is too great to say that price if I knew it.  I work with people who are struggling to live month to month and they really are not the type of people who would ever buy an original piece of art work in their lives, ever.  

  We used to have this guy that came at night and did the custodial work.  A black young man who worked as a barber during the day.  He had a wife and several children, and he was struggling to put his son in a private church based school in the hopes of escaping the fate that sometimes happens to young black males raised in the South.  This man would come to my cubicle, back when my hotline shift was 3 pm to 11:30 pm, to empty the trash.  I had this practice of when I finished a painting I would hang it in my cubicle  a few days to see if I could find all the flaws, or needs for tweaks.  He admired several of my paintings and asked me if I would sell them and how much.  I would have given him the paintings, but I could sense he had some pride and was wanting to be a buyer of art, not a receiver of some dude's hobby pieces.  So I sold him three or four paintings while he worked there, usually $15 or $10 each.    What is money to me?  I have a painting storage problem, and not a fan base of people clamoring for my art. He helps me out because without him, I'd have less room behind the doors.  Since then, when the house gets too full of old work, I started renting this climate controlled place at a storage facility and I stack the old stuff there.

 The collage I did recently, of my dog Tucker, was donated to this No Kill Pet Shelter and at their fund raiser auction it brought almost $600 which is the most anyone has ever paid for one of my works of art, but that was an auction and there was the"this is for a good cause" factor going on then.  Still it makes one wonder if there might be some value to my work of which I am not aware.  I retire officially at the end of this month, but my last work day is 11/26/14.  I think there will be a retirement party and Kathie and Melain, and maybe my mother-in-law will attend. She is 89 now and not doing OK, but still, she will not enter any three legged races in the near future.  

I can't imagine not working.  I have been working steady for 47 years.  Now I hope to paint and write and survive in a retirement for which  never actually prepared.