Painted 1998
in Miami Beach
Acrylic
on canvas, 36 x 36 inches (90 x 90 cm)
Wayne Mello
collection, Boston
See the painting just done a week before:
Everglades 1
Poem
Mid-Life
Crisis
The unforgiving past prevents escape.
The unknowable future recedes like a mirage,
luring us with dreams of redemption. We learn,
too late, that life is but a blade of grass, swaying
to he music of . . . The Neverglades
Jim Tommaney April
1999
Story:
(about
the collector)
Wayne owns some of my very best
early pieces: Breakthrough, Salvador Doily. He has the flair
to show up in the gallery just as I manage to undertake
successfully a new experiment, and has the invaluable
gift to purchase barely dried pieces while I am
late on my bills. I have to carve a marble statue
of him, and erect it in the center of Espanola Square
(an upcoming fountain near my Studio) with a 24-carat
gold inscription: "To Wayne Mello, with gratitude
from The Arts". (Les Arts being, in this case, FPL, Bell South,
my Landlady and my paint supplier) In the case of
this piece, he commissioned me to do something I
had wanted to do all along, ever since I started
the "Hit the Road" series, but that I
did not have the stamina to try. He was right, and
the painting is beautiful.
I had a lot of
inquiries for a print. It is done now, presented
in a 11 x 14 inches hand cut mat-board, with Jim
Tommaney poem hand written with pencil. I
have another version, with only the title "Everglades"
