"Portrait of my mother dumping our garbage off the wharfs of Port Clyde."

Here's a little before and after, as things were going along at the time. Basically the composition of the painting was pretty well nailed down even before I took the first photo of the painting. You know, before I added the "snow" coming down. The idea being to get all the broad areas and details taken care of first before I put the snow fall in the mix.

So this is my first painting I did about my mother. I painted it while I was in the hard-scrabble of coming off a life-long booze habit. I started it after the d.t.'s and hallucinations left me. I had to wait at least that long, as my painting hand wasn't very steady, and neither was much else about me, to be completely honest about it. Looking back today, I've not a doubt in my mind what-so-ever that her spirit was hooverin' 'round over me last summer, helpin' keep her boy on the straight-n-narrow from here to eternity. Hey, it's a mother's job. There's a blessin an' a curse to everythin' that comes our way. You only got to look at your bible to get my drift, if you don't see it in the daily news or otherwise get enough from experience every day.

I pulled it off, though. I finished "Portrait of my mother. . ." around the mid-summer mark of 2006. And it was sold not too long after mid-winter down in New York city. Beats all !! Now I can in all honesty tell folks that I "sold my mother down the river". Well, at least over to the Jersey side. Ha!

Most of the rest of the time in the five or six paintings I've done where my mother appears, she ranges from about 1/2 to a full 3/4 of and inch high, to a relatively gargantuan 3 full inches tall in one particular painting that I can think of; now long sold. (There's a lot of writing on the back of "Portrait of my mother dumping our garbage off the wharfs of Port Clyde", by the way. Initially I had planned to make a large elaborate frame for it, out of an old time wooden storm door. I still have the storm door and the things I bought to go along with the plan that would fit into the frame. A few people have asked me whether I'm going to paint another one similar to this. Considering it took me THIS FRIGGEN LONG to paint THIS ONE, I'd say the chances aren't very good).

I like the look I captured on "Portrait of my mother dumping our garbage off the wharfs of Port Clyde". My mother has that kind of "deer caught in the headlights look" going on which amuses me, mainly because there wasn't much that I can remember about her that caught her off guard. As I've come full circle in my appreciation of and for my mother, (and glad I lived long enough to see it through) I do appreciate that aspect of her personality. She wasn't one to suffer fools gladly, not by a long shot, and in fact some of 'em she'd take out after with a base ball bat or a stick or whatever was handy when someone got her ire up. It's the stuff of Port Clyde legend.

I kind-a miss that rough and tumble private "set-to" attitude of settling things that was quite common on the streets of old Port Clyde. I won't name names here of the various denizens who brawled their way into local lore. I don't have to. That my mother was a culprit amongst 'em is enough to say. She'd confront you and take you on whether you was a man or a woman, it didn't really matter much. You do that now a-days and it's cop-city. Everyone gets into the act, and it's assault and battery, and a li'l bit o' jail time for your jollies, but back then it was just par for the course. You got your face rubbed in it, or your ol' bald head pissed on, maybe a little do-see-doe (dose-e-doe?) of road rash, swinging your pard-nah round-n-round, ( a punch in the ear and another in the nose, a few to the old beer gut ) and you got on with things in the after-thrash. Sure, guns came out now and again, don't get me wrong. It's a small town and there's booze and lobstermen, and that's a tale as old as time. But guns for mowing down human beings is for cretins and is always a certinous act in any personal set of domestic problems. Since the whole town back then was mostly related to one another anyway, it's often a case of blood being thicker-n-water. If you drew it, you'd pay the price. Still and all, we all got along as best we knew how. What more can you ask?

But that aside, let's get back on course here. Dumping the garbage off the wharfs was a ritual that went on for a long time with us Port Clyde natives, and just about every other town on the coastline, stretching back to time immemorial. Sure, no one these days wants to cop to it, but it WENT ON just the same. All that feedin' on all that community garbage made for some honkin' size ("sizah's" we'd call 'em) wharf rats, I can tell you!!

Holy-moly, I'll tell you what -- I remember seeing 'em scurrying across the flats on the cove at low tide, day in and day out like family pets gone feral, or sometimes I'd hear 'em out there wrangling tin cans by moonlight (sometimes with the tin cans "on" -- actually over their heads), scavenging down the last succulent morsel out of some washed up Chef Boyardee Beef-a-Roni can, down amongst the rock-weed. I'd look out the childhood window I always looked out of at Cony's shack some of those nights when the natives were restless. Down in the cove by the foot of the docks some of them wharf rats to my wondering eyes did appear to be more or less the size of a freakin' Jack Russell Terrier, and every bit as frisky.

I doubt my mother was the last of a kind doing dumping garbage off the docks, but I would be willing to bet, pretty near so. This was back in the days (lest we forget) when those that were too poor to own a car or a truck to go to the town dump just chucked bags of garbage off the wharfs end to go out with the tide. This was before plastic garbage bags were all the rage, mind you. These were paper grocery bags from Ralph Simmons's "Port Clyde General", and later when it became Nealy Morse's, and still later on through all them that owned it and my mother's days in Port Clyde she'd go down the trodden path to past Cony's shack -- although he was dead by then, old Cony, the shack was still standing, such as it was, so derelict it may as well have been make believe. Some kind of set decoration in a documentary about worn down gone to hell lobsterman's shacks and welfare mothers out on their "night errands" dumping their sacks of garbage off the ends of the wharfs of Port Clyde.

cwo