Yesterday, I started posting Lunch Money Paintings to promote my move sale.
I’m selling all my art at cost before putting my stuff in storage and beginning my year-long experiment in traveling and making art. This means I want to sell 200+ paintings in two weeks. The cheapest ones are Lunch Money Paintings.
Lunch Money Paintings are so called because they’re the price of a nice lunch—22.6€ + shipping. They’re the 9″ x 12″ oils on watercolor paper works I made in Mexico City last month on the roof of the hostel where I volunteered (aka, sat by the liquor drawing people to induce drink-buying). I’m breaking them up into subgalleries to blog, since there are about 60 of them and that’s too many for people to really see them.
Western View
Yesterday’s post featured the East/Southeastern view from the hostel roof of Cathedral Metropolitana, the biggest cathedral in the Americas. Today’s features the Western view.
Other than the slowly setting sun and haze of very many cars between very many mountains, the predominant feature of the Western sky in the heart of Mexico City’s federal district is the Torre Latinamericano.
At 44 stories high, the Tower is the world’s first skyscraper built on highly active seismic land. It withstood the 1985 earthquake.
On a bad air day, the top can disappear in the midday haze that bites newcomers’ throats. But at night it always seems to slice up into the sky, as if marking the city for God to come back to.
You can pay 80 pesos to go the top for a panoramic view of the city.
Or you can make friends with Dmitri who works on the 29th floor and get in for free.
Below the tower, pigeons take flight before the evening thunderstorms that come on suddenly, early warning signs flashing quiet gray.
The storms consume everything. Landmarks, horizon, metal grates over closed shops, police clustered on corners in the darkness.
They wash the city clean before the sun goes to bed in the Cathedral. They wash the air, too, that otherwise smells vaguely of the incompletely closed sewage system running underground. And they leave something extra there. The charge of the storm.
