rabbits are back, additional tax, gifted apprentice

1. For months the sign at Long Horn Meat has said “Rabbits Are Back.” I would have thought the rabbits would have run past by now.

2. I’m working at a café this morning but I forgot to get a receipt for my latte and schnecken. That’s an extra dollar I’ll have to pay in taxes!

3. The art on the walls this week is better than usual for this kind of place. The kid -– it’s undoubtedly an art student – can draw figures, has a sense of how to position the human body to compose within a frame, uses an attractive palette – lots of white, black details, and backgrounds in nuanced shades of warm and cool-– and rarest of all, can paint facial and gestural expressions. Oil/watercolor/marker on paper. There’s a closeup of a young woman tilting her head onto her shoulder, where the head fills the upper right quadrant with white skin, red lips, and black eyebrows, leading the viewer down to the white neck and chest of the lower left: geometric and human equally. It’s hard to tell whether the paintings were done from photographs. The faces are so real, I’d say yes; but the figures’ stances are paintinglike; people don’t usually stand in those attitudes unless posing. Skillful cropping of snapshots could do it. Which in itself requires a fine eye, so it’s not cheating. A future professional, perhaps a book illustrator. I’d buy a piece if I were a bit more sentimental.