90″ x 54″
acrylic on canvas
1974
This painting was done in 1974, when I lived in Monroe, LA, and was done from a photograph of a zinnia in a small hurricane glass I noticed by my 4-yr-old son’s bed when I tucked him in. My mother had told me that I didn’t have talent, because I couldn’t paint glass. In college she had done an oil painting of a glass vase that her teacher “fixed” for her. I showed her. And then I realized it represented her manipulated reality that I grew up in. The photo-realistic painting is not real, just a painting, no more real than the Glass Menagerie of Tennessee Williams. It makes the viewer think they are seeing glass.