Diving Girl, acrylic, newspaper and mixed media on carved wood panel, 36 x 26 1/2

Detail:

and Mr. Lucky’s, acrylic, newspaper and mixed media on carved wood panel, 39 1/2 x 36

Detail:

Thank you to Barbara Burghardt Roether for going with me on a scary cloudy gloomy day to the deserted parking lot of Mr. Lucky’s on an especially bleak stretch of Grand Avenue, a strip of wrong side of the tracks that runs diagonally and industrially and strip clubby through Phoenix. Barb took the pictures for me, because she knows what she’s doing with a camera and I do not, while a zombie-looking guy appeared across the lot and walked straight at us, slowly. We got the pictures we could and fled. Thanks so much Barb! It was fun being in the zombie apocalypse with you!

and a bit more about Diving Girl:

The Diving Girl shows up as matchbooks and hood ornaments and neon signs wherever delightful vintag-y things may be found, in a red or blue one-piece, either singly or in threes. There are several iterations of the three-girl sign that lights up girl by girl, apex to fingertips in the water. The one in this painting has been apexing over the Starlite Motel in Mesa, Arizona, since 1958. In October 2011 a massive hailstorm knocked her to the ground and she wound up on display in a mall while funds were gathered for restoration. She’s back in the sky now where she belongs, but for a while we got to see her up close and personal, rivets and all. Here she is on the ground after the storm:

(Those are not my pictures–they were on the display at the mall.)

Here she is at the mall . . .

and here she is again, in my painting in an ad for Art One in the Arcadia News:

More signage to come!