NEW PAINTING - A SUMMER SWIM

Original painting discovered in a second-hand shop in Pine Hills, Orlando

Found this dusty landscape sandwiched behind a mountain of cockroach droppings and soggy cardboard at a local second-hand shop on OBT. The space is notorious for not having any air conditioning so you can generally only enter for a hot-minute (har har) before having to slither back into your car for a break.

I immediately started thinking about putting some nude bathers into the water. I’d recently heard about a place called Sawmill on the west coast of Florida where the LGBTQ-alphabet soup go to get wild and not wear pants in public. So a little bit of my inner dialogue about what that must be like kind of creeped into the piece - compete with weird dude in sunglasses hanging in the bushes.