Still Life With Four Twenty Flowers

Still Life with Four Twenty Flowers
Oil on canvas
14" x 11"

  As I pulled into my local Sacramento dispensary at opening time on Wednesday i saw a line of people snaking out the door and immediately realized ... Oooops, i forgot today is FOUR TWENTY.

At first i thought it would just be a long wait to get in.  Then i realized what the line was for - free swag.  Some people told me they took the day off work to drive around to all the dispensaries they could to take advantage of all the freebies.  One group said they were heading to the Bay Area next.

Wow - This holiday has changed - I tell myself.  I remember 20 years ago when you just left work a little early to be home and ready to light up by 4:20 in the afternoon on April 20th.   Now it's swag parties and giveaways like some treasure hunt you never care to complete.  I wonder what the rest of America will think of this?  

Cannabis culture has changed so much and is still changing and so many people are still afraid to talk about it publicly (including me).  I want to speak about it within my artwork.  I want to explain it with colorful imagery.  I want to tell stories in paint.  In a decade we will all think of cannabis as a simple glass of wine or headache remedy or sleep aid.

So I picked up my freshly dried flowers, my free buy one get one free eighth (for not previously realizing what day of the year it was) and free t-shirt for being among the first 100 customers willing to wait in a long line to get in the door on this not so secret holiday.  I went home to put on my new cannabis shirt (pretending i would dare wear it out in public) and then i meditated medicated on designing this new floral still life in my sunny California art studio.

I worked on this canvas on April 20th and 21st.  I completed it on the 23rd and it took me a little while to decide quite how to present this. Here is my first painting: The strains pictured in this still life painting are Superglue, Pre'98 Bubba Kush, and good ol' Grand Daddy Purps.  I love my spiral sorting dish and i keep my flowers sealed and organized in small glass jars in this cigar humidor.  I screwed the jar lids to the inside of the top of this humidor and I label each jar with color coded stickers to tell me the strain name and color tells me whether its a sativa, an indica, or a hybrid.  Ill show that off in my next painting.