and the fight begins......

going through my storage unit again today i became even more aware that i was merely circulating piles of stuff into more and new piles... and at the end of the day, i had basically nothing in the trash.  argh.

it went like this until i came across my husband's stockpile.   ha! i thought it won't be hard to throw out his old stuff.  this will help start me ---i will be building a hole in the unit and other "stuff" will follow......  

my husband's stockpile was his life long collection of  has for years  Ring(boxing) magazines.  he just might have every single Ring magazine that's ever been published.  of course i had to thumb through a few -i became i enthralled.  i know what you are thinking - you are thinking that i will do anything to distract myself from clearing out the unit....ha!  ok, caught me.  guilty as charged.

but, it was interesting.

back in the 1930's sports writing was more esoteric and poetic.  there were interesting guest writers; they were more descriptive because they had to be - there was no sports tv coverage to show you how the fight actually went down.  and how it went down is, of course, the more important part,  more important and surely more colorful than the actual end result of the fight.  unless you are gambling on it. or if you were the one who was in charge of fixing the fight.  if so, i'm guessing the end result is all that matters.

in the 1930's as you know, americans were suffering from the great depression.  kinda like now.   radio was the epicenter of families.   very norman rockwell, i imagine.   

so leafing through my husband's old magazines this depression era really resonated with me.  hey, i kinda feel like these folks - the dust bowl,  steinbeck's people- they suffered so much.  ok i am doing better than living in a dusty camp - still, i feel one day soon i won't be able to afford junk food, liquor or art supplies.  

so continues (....a fading picture emerges and thought bubble appears....) my time dribbling away - off to dreaming again.  ... norman rockwell's paintings...euuu-aww. until then, i was perfectly willing to throw out his stuff.  less painful for me that way.

but the longer i looked the more i liked.

when i started painting again in the early 2000's i had no idea of what i wanted to paint - the subject matter was not foremost in my mind.  i only wanted to paint colors.   splash paint around like a kindergartener. 

then it clicked i will paint boxers fighting, but in my own made up colors.  that should keep my husband happy and give me a focus to paint.  i painted several dozen.  i began to really like this exercise because i was beginning to better understand human physiology and dramatic lighting.  my brush strokes started to shorten and become more excited, like i imagined was the atmosphere ringside. colors - lots of them - some blurred as the fights were intense.

so thinking more positive now -i ask,  why would i want to chuck out all this wonderful imagery?  i brought boxes of them home.  my husband was so relieved to see that i had not thrown them out - it took him a lifetime to accumulate this cache.  he thanked me, i just shrugged.  i'm defeated - there is no way i will get this done without a neutral intermeddler.

*sigh*

i painted this painting in 2004, it's of billy cahn and someone else....do you like the green and orange trunks? (not unheard of these days, i know) 

so i ask you.....how does one ever get anything into the trash?  it's all so precious.  am i right?

i'm going to go to bed now and read up a bit on joe louis.  pow! Bam!