Smokes and Baskets

11" x 15", watercolour, 1999, private collection

This was going to be part of a series of paintings where I juxtaposed a guy playing sports while exhibiting relatively unhealthy behaviour like drinking booze and smoking, but this was the only one I did, even though I had my friend Chris over for a photo shoot where we covered a bunch of different ideas. Neither of us are smokers, and, since we didn't have any cigarettes on hand, I used a white pencil crayon as a stand-in.

During the shoot we were laughing at the ridiculous and unlikely set-ups we were creating and –not one week later– while we were shooting hoops at a local community centre, we saw a one of the guys at the basketball net near ours actually smoking while playing basketball. Ridiculous life imitating ridiculous art.

And yes, I realize that particular drop of sweat makes it look like he's got a snaggly tooth, but it kind of adds to the ridiculousness.

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