"Just a Small Cut"
LBT, 87 years old and paralyzed from the chest down, was dying in my bedroom for 7.5 months. She had a marvelously upbeat attitude most of the time, even as dementia distorted her sense of reality near the end. I was her night attendant, coming whenever she called.
This is one of the paintings from that period. It began as a lark to lighten another of LBT's boring days in bed... I taped a large piece of paper on the wall at the end of her bed when she wasn't looking. A few minutes later I bounced into the room dressed in underwear and stood up against the paper in the above pose, noisily convincing FT to trace an outline of my body with pencil. Ooo-la-la! It was rudimentary technique, but LBT was completely surprised and charmed by the whole clumsy and theatrically unfolding event between her son and me.
There were quite a few women in those days (2009) who could see themselves as the character in the painting.
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