By Ron Momogeeshick Peters

This painting is done with bingo markers, acrylic paint and pencil on acid free paper.

I had been hanging out with an artist friend of mine, a physciatrist and monumental painter. He was ( and still is) of Asian descent and he talked about discipline and the arts. In his country, a practioner of the ink and paper involves an apprenticeship period of over 30 years. Yes, thirty years. Within that time, a painter does as many images as possible. He is also indentured to one or more Masters during this gestation period. They learn how to paint and draw anywhere anytime and in any weather condition. The epitome of being an artist is to load your brush with a dab of color here, a dash of color there and a dip into the water and in one stroke paint a fish here, another there and over there. Dip you brush into more dabs and another stroke later, the sea presents itself with attendant weeds and corals. Of course you could do horses, birds, landscapes or anything your mind desired with other paintings. During the 30 year apprenticeship, the artist wouldn’t show their works to anyone.

I was thinking about the terrible frustration that these artists, the ones that Mr. Loh talked about, had to go through and this was in my thoughts and dreams forever. At the height of the winter season ( whilst camped in a winter tent underneath the Bathhurst Street Bridge in Toronto, Ontario, Canada) I had gone to visit my sister Norma during a wicked snowstorm. I met up with her at the suggested meeting place at a bingo hall. I always carried my art supplies with me more so than I would toilet paper or matches.

I warmed myself up with coffee and conversation and the game got underway. The night wore on and soon it was time for the Jackpot.This was going to be a good night for somebody as the grand prize was somewhere in the 5 grand mark.That night, I didn’t feel graced by the Bingo Hall Gods but I knew the bingo dabber gods were smiling down upon their prodigal son. I didn’t play, instead I lazily drew some pictures and set a line of dabbed blobs of acrylic paint to do a typical realistic image. My sister Norma got dramatic and I could feel the emotion across the table. She was one number away from the Jackpot: B8. Everytime the numbers were called they were under the B’s. The anticipation was palpable till the winning number was called out but it wasn’t under the B8.

When Norma’s drama started, I had already started the blue background and I grabbed the blue and red dabbers and painted with that. The red dabber dots represent cranberries and the blue dots represent blueberries. I took a discarded bingo card and scraped the dabs with it and with one stroke I outlined the face and while it was still wet I finished it off with the pencil. I painted the figures on the border to represent the empending cross paths of fate and destiny. The pleasures and anguish of anticipation are represented by the cascading rays emanating from the right. The lizard is a crawler that spans time. The whole execution of this image took about five to ten minutes.

Under The B8.
Bingo.

Trackback this Post | Feed on comments to this Post