Artwork Description:
On Dec. 16, 2010, while helping my wife scrape ice off her car windshield, I slipped on black ice and put most of my back muscles into a spasm that had me having to sit up in order to sleep for months plus seven months worth of excruciating pain.
19 days later the two sections of our new mobile home arrived, and I spent the next five months standing in the cold, windy, wet, muddy, snowy, icey weather to supervise the installation of this structure. I did this all day, every day for five months, and at night I would scream the screams of a person being tortured. My doctor did not believe in pain management so that made things even more difficult.
The mud was usually so thick and deep that if you stood in one place for more than seven seconds, you could not get your boots out of the mud.
It seemed to me that these mud-caked boots told the story of those five months better than any other image. It was also one of the few paintings I had the time to paint during the long (three years) process of finding, financing, installing and moving into a double-wide trailer, and it was the first of only three paintings accomplished in the entire year of 2011.