Painting Jac and West Side Story

Road Trip Day 25: 16th June 2007

After spending the morning grocery shopping with Rose I chose to spend my Saturday afternoon finishing the painting I started on Wednesday.

As before I filmed myself doing it, even wearing the same clothes so it looks like I painted the whole thing in one day. All up it took me seven hours over two days to get finished. I'm quite happy with the result. The painting is called 'Jac Leaps Again' and is an all acrylic work on plywood, 60 x 90cm approx.

Since, in my first post on this painting, I talked about my old studio I've decided to make that the theme of the video. This means that I'll need to take some time filming footage of me speaking to camera about... well... my old studio. Once I've done this I'll edit the whole thing together so you can watch me paint and talk about my studio at the same time.

Speaking of filming, that's a nice seg-way into talking about the DVD we watched tonight. Rose bought 'West Side Story', the 10 time Oscar winner made some time in the nineteen sixties (I think).

I'm not about to launch into a movie review but I will say, the standards for winning an Oscar must have been very different back then. I thought the whole movie was over choreographed to the point that even the non dance sequences seemed wooden and unnatural.

My biggest problem though was the opening dance number where the Jets (for those of you not familiar with the movie, the Jets are a teenage street gang) are running around trying to act all tough and heavy whilst doing light on your feet, gazelle like dance steps that could've been ripped from Swan Lake. Silly.

It's not a film I particularly enjoyed and I imagine it probably works better in the confines of a smaller stage. The film had way too much space and I feel they wasted time extending the dance numbers to make use of all the extra room the movie sets provided.

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