TheBanyanTree: I don't know a lot about art . . .

[Peter Macinnis]

  . . . but I know what I don't like.

I am exasperated.  My sil has just discovered paint and canvas, and 
without warning or ado, has proclaimed to the world, or such portions of 
it as can be slowed sufficiently, that she has discovered that she is an 
artist, and already has a number of commissions.  Given the way she has 
been attempting to bully me into taking one of her vile concoctions, I 
know what these "commissions" mean: the caving-in of the weak and infirm.

Just one canvas, to date, has not been copied from one of the daubs she 
has bought over the years from "genuine working artists" (you could even 
see them working, and they had their own easels) that she encountered in 
tourist traps along the Seine or other such places.

This one non-derivative work features two legless ducks, twined around 
each other.  Their mothers appear to have been frightened by a large 
dolphin, moments before laying their eggs.  The beaks owe rather more to 
the budgerigar genus, and the wings have come from a moulting emu.  Or 
possibly from a rabid haystack.

This is, let me explain to new readers, the sister-in-law who had for 
many years, a painting -- AN ORIGINAL! as she often reminded us -- by 
the famous painter, Apres Matisse, in her dining room, the same gullible 
twerp who accepted my explanation that the libretto of an opera is named 
after Luigi Libretto, who wrote the first opera lyrics, and the men are 
all called Don because there was a fashion for the name Donald and other 
Scottish names in Italy, introduced by Signore Macaroni e Machiavelli.

(Or did I tell her Machiavelli was the Italian version of Louis Pasta? 
I forget now.  Maybe I told her both . . .)

She is determined that I will praise one of her works, and then be 
presented with it, along with an inflated bill for the materials.

I would as soon be boiled in rancid viper venom.

peter

-- 
  _--|\   Peter Macinnis, feral wordsmith, & science gossip,
/     \  friend of flatworms, pseudoscorpions and onychophorans;
\.--._*  confidence advisor, Australian skydiving trampoline relay team
      v   http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/index.htm