Our beloved pet was a rescue dog we plucked from a cardboard box on a horrendously hot August day. We paid the box’s warden $5.00 and took home an animal that for the next fourteen years showed us each day her gratefulness. The way we talk about that dog, you’d think she died yesterday, but the reality is she was “on the roof” (vet speak for a dog about to head off to Doggie Heaven) four years ago.
We were so wacky over Truffles, we commissioned a life-size oil portrait, which hangs on the wall of her favorite room: the dining room. Truffles portrait was painted by Shawn Bridges (www.shawnbridges.com), a friend and creative personality of such production, I question whether she ever sleeps.
I became curious about pet portraitists and their ability to imbue a painting with a pet’s essence and began communicating with pet portraitist Ellen Silverberg (www.paintedpetportraits.com) about this particular talent. Through our correspondence, I learned that Ellen wears an apron as she paints pets, a notation not lost on me! Ellen became one of the forty-seven storytellers in my exhibit Apron Chronicles: A Patchwork of American Recollections! (www.apronchronicles.com)
Now, all these years later, I happened upon an apron mention by Sandra Spencer (www.sandraspencer.typepad.com), a pet portraitist who loves The Apron Book, a notation not lost on me!
Neither our parents nor our children are memorialized in the dramatic fashion that is portraiture…the four-inch faux gold frame the deciding bit of finish. Call us nutso, but this purchase brings us daily joy.
xxea
Tie One On…an apron, of course!