Pickles by Brian Crane for May 02, 2023

Sylvia you’re not displaying Opal’s paintings very well.

My mother used to paint. She gave it up when my dad “improved” one of her paintings without permission, using unmatching colors. He was color-blind. It was major doghouse time for him.

My wonderful Aunt Helen gave us a Kewpie doll with a dress she’d hand-crocheted to put over the spare toilet paper roll in our bathroom. I found it a bit eerie utilizing the facility with the Kewpie doll watching. We would hide it in a drawer and remember to bring it out when she visited.

I guess it depends on your reasons for painting to start with. Most of the people I know that paint/draw do so bc they enjoy spending their time doing it. But if your goal is to make money, have your paintings in galleries/shows or win praise/accolades and you aren’t accomplishing that then i suppose it would make sense to just give it up

face it Opal, no one wanted to read your lousy book and nobody wants your crappy paintings

just keep busy knitting your equally useless whatevers and making your husband’s life miserable – that seems to be what you’re best at

Opal should get her art published in a Pickles frame…

If you enjoy painting, I’d say you should keep on doing it. Just don’t expect to make money from it. Or maybe you should just find another way to express your creativity. Adult coloring books are still very popular. You could try that.

Opal wants (her paintings) to come out of the closet.

They are highly valued wall protectors.

Better than in the “rest room”!

From now on, she will have Earl do the painting, the walls, ceiling, etc!

Woman at worker was a painter and I bought one of them, very nice and not surreal like a lot of modern art. Though, I do like Dali, early and late periods.

WOW.!! - - — OUCH…….

Artists are NEVER appreciated until they’re dead. So, if you want people to like your art, just keep ticking Earl off.

One of my aunts took up painting. We were all pretending to admire it until my father said "The sun’s up here, but the shadow is going the wrong way. The shadow was at a left angle to the sun.

Opal, you problem is you don’t know how to paint a “happy little mountain, or happy trees, or a happy stream, or happy birds flying in the sky.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LygUyAb78oY

I have some doilies my grandmother crocheted, and a painting my father in law did. The doilies live in the drawer in my china cabinet, and the painting has pride of place over the TV in the living room.

I guess Opal can paint about as well as Florence Foster Jenkins could sing.

Poor Opal! So forlorn….but it’s for the best. For all of us!

My wife’s aunt painted a lot and we have several of her works hanging around the house. They’re just fine.

Hey, just like our kid’s pictures on the refrigerator (they’re successful middle-agers now).

Her daughter’s response reminds me of my daughter’s response to the cover songs I send her. Everyone needs a sweet daughter in their life.

You can’t fool Mom!

If you’re painting as a hobby, then the only audience that matters is yourself. Opal should keep right on with it, and fill up a closet. Then, when she and Earl are gone, and the kids are cleaning out the house, she can annoy them one last time as they throw her artwork out. Plus she gets one last little guilt trip in. It’s a win for Opal!

I have known a few artists in my lifetime, and when I would offer to buy something, I was told they couldn’t give them up. Beautiful work, but unless they were given as gifts, no one else got any. They paint for the beauty they can create and want to keep looking at it, I guess. I have zero talent in the art field, other than I can make clothes and design them. No training, it was necessity. I am small and was very, very skinny. I enjoyed it and on occasion did sew for others, but not for money.

Forget them all, Opal. Do what makes you happy.

My wife thought that Opal mirrors Marie on Everyone Loves Raymond because everything she does is nonpareil and underappreciated.

Now she’s——-the SUPER SNOOP!!!!

I have three wonderful paintings by my mother in different rooms of my house.