Long long ago, in a house next door. . .

We're having a moving sale.

It'll be five years this June that we loaded up the kids and all our stuff and headed West. We went from Florida to the Oregon Coast, with dreams of a life less humid. We didn't have jobs lined up, but we figured we could be poor anywhere, so we might as well enjoy the scenery while we were at it. We stayed with my mom for the first week, while we found a little house to rent and a job (or two). I found work at a little gallery, and at a fabric store.

Dylan stayed at home with the kids, and started to learn how to have our own little arty business online. We started with little tiny paintings. He cut the wood and primed it, and I took the little boards with me to work at the gallery (it wasn't a successful gallery, so I had to keep myself busy). There I doodled folky cats and birds and bunnies and skeletons and whatever else tickled my fancy.

Cart Before The Horse was born.

This was my very first little painting.

We listed it on ebay for $14 I think. It didn't sell.

So we listed it again for $9. No one was interested.

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Now here it is, five years later, and we're moving again. This time we're just moving across town, out of the flood and tsunami zones. No cross-country trek. In the course of packing we revisited so many little rejected paintings, and decided to give them one more shot at finding a home (they've been on a dark shelf in a closet for too long). This time they're being listed for a penny. Undignified? Perhaps, but so is the closet.
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Here's another very early one, inspired by the funny little birds that run along the edges of the coast. I really liked this one, but I was alone in my appreciation.

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This one is actually the very first Bone Daddy, a character I have revisited many many times over the years. He wasn't really rejected by the world, but rather by us on account of he has that chip on the bottom corner of his block. He was inspired by traditional Guatemalan Day of the Dead figures, like these. I'm very fond of Day of the Dead, for many reasons, but that's another post. . .