Banjo Player

When you want genuine music – music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whiskey, go right through you like Brandreth’s pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pinfeather pimples on a picked goose – when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!
—- Mark Twain

John Pedigo of the O's. From a photograph taken at a beer festival, Fair Park, Dallas, Texas.  (click to enlarge)

John Pedigo of the O’s. From a photograph taken at The Big Texas Beer Fest, Fair Park, Dallas, Texas.
(click to enlarge)

They think the banjo can only be happy, but that’s not true.
—-Bela Fleck

Digital Art – Bicycles

After having saved money for years I now have a graphics suite installed on a computer at home – Photoshop, The Gimp, Illustrator, and Corel Painter along with a Wacom Tablet.

What I want to do is to develop some skills… and more importantly, a vision. Right now, though, I’m playing around and learning my way around the pixels. Here’s a couple simple ones I did last night… both bicycle related.

Cruiser in the French Quarter

Cruiser in the French Quarter

If you are curious… for the original source of this – look here.

Folder

Folder

Loving Oil and Gas

Somewhere near Fair Park… Dallas, Texas

“The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam…”
― J.G. Ballard

Loving Oil and Gas, Dallas, Texas

Loving Oil and Gas, Dallas, Texas

Just wrap your legs round these velvet rims
And strap your hands across my engines
—-Bruce Springsteen, Born To Run

We sat in the car
& the night dropped
down until the
only sounds were
the crickets &
the dance of our voices

& for a moment
the world became
small enough to
roll back & forth
between us.”
― Brian Andreas, Hearing Voices – Collected Stories & Drawings

“I come to a red light, tempted to go through it, then stop once I see a billboard sign that I don’t remember seeing and I look up at it. All it says is ‘Disappear Here’ and even though it’s probably an ad for some resort, it still freaks me out a little and I step on the gas really hard and the car screeches as I leave the light.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

“[And there was the matter of Dick Turpin. It looked like the same car, except that forever afterwards it seemed able to do 250 miles on a gallon of petrol, ran so quietly that you practically had to put your mouth over the exhaust pipe to see if the engine was firing , and issued its voice-synthesized warnings in a series of exquisite and perfectly-phrased haikus, each one original and apt…
Late frost burns the bloom
Would a fool not let the belt
Restrain the body?
…it would say. And,
The cherry blossom
Tumbles from the highest tree
One needs more petrol]”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

Four Women

Digital Painting done with Corel Painter and The Gimp, based on a photograph taken in the reflecting pool in front of the Winspear Opera House, Dallas, Texas

“Used to say there was four women in every man’s heart. The Maid in the
Meadow, the Demon Lover, the Stouthearted Woman, the Tall and Quiet Woman.”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

Four Women, Winspear Opera House, Dallas, Texas

Four Women, Winspear Opera House, Dallas, Texas