This is not my monkey

This post is dedicated to my friend L. It's not her monkey either but, with a story that's all her own, she introduced me to this wonderfully useful expression: "This is not my monkey. This is not my circus."  Or in reverse order, in Polish! 

Since L's and my conversation some months back, I seem to see monkeys everywhere. Just today in the grocery store, I saw and envied a young woman wearing a brown cardigan inhabited by monkeys of all colours of the rainbow. One of my spectacular finds was the sidewalk sculpture shown above. As you can see in the link, it sits outside Vancouver's Heffel Gallery, where this week's blockbuster auction of Group of Seven works broke all kinds of records.

Of course, some of my sightings were due to the Year of the Monkey -- our Canadian stamp, for example.

And this funky commemorative bottle, filled with wine that's probably unpalatable.

Coincidentally in this same time period, I'd started a painting of a wonderful thrift store find of two clown acrobats. They're made to hang one above the other in an ingenious trapeze set-up, but I let them take a fall.

I reviewed my old paintings and chose the next in line to be retired, repainted and resurrected into something new -- a 2003 painting called, "Eastern Flavours." It had been a nice experiment in using different shades of red but always had many flaws -- one of them was the lurid "lip" of the Dragon Fruit.

I started with my usual small study that went breezily:

Despite the initial confusion of working over "Eastern Flavours," I was on a roll. Maybe it was the clowns' energy, but it was one of those experiences (rare for me) where you can say, "The painting painted itself."

Now here's the very odd thing -- which YOU might already have noticed.  I was just starting to hone in on the details of these oversized figurines...

...when I realized that the funny blob between the hands of the clown on the right is -- OMG, a monkey! A circus monkey!!

And not a very nice monkey at that.

Does he bear a slight resemblance to the lurid Dragon Fruit? Well, even Picasso's circus monkey looks like an unpleasant customer -- not half as nice as the sweet sidewalk monkey on Vancouver's Gallery Row.

With all the pizzazz of these acrobats, I finished "Taking a Tumble" in record time. Here's the finished performance, and you can view its progress here.

I guess I now have to admit that...........this IS my monkey.