Mooney Arts™
 
“The Last Drink” By Peter Mooney Acrylic on foil 2008 PAINTING BY NUMBERS When we were born, we were each handed a paint by the numbers kit. We were promised it had everything you needed. Your job was to neatly fill in the little outlined areas with the colors that matched the numbers. Someday, you were told, you’d see the big picture. You worked, you slaved, you put in all the years it took to fill in all those little areas without even one little speck of paint falling outside its intended area. Around the age of 50, if not much earlier, you couldn’t help but begin to notice that while the painting was nearly complete, it looked like nothing. It was just a bunch of random swirls, blobs and lines going nowhere, forming no remotely recognizable anything. It resembled only something a drunk might doodle on a wet napkin shortly before he dropped dead. Not even the slightest hint of a single recognizable object, person or animal. Nothing. At this point in our lives we divide ourselves into two distinct groups. One group feels cheated and they either throw the painting they worked so hard on for so many years out or pour alcohol all over it and set it ablaze. It’s gone. The other group decides to stare at this thing for a while longer and wonder what the Hell is it? After all, they have labored over this thing, often quite intensely, their entire lives. Then something magical happens. They start to at least imagine they see things. They start off just seeing maybe something that might sort of remind them of a dog’s mouth or the front section of a plane. But once the imagination kicks in it’s impossible to stop. They start seeing more and more things. They start seeing the interplay between these things and why they’re together in the picture. The possible reasons for the placement of every little thing they see and the possible symbolic meanings behind each one begins to seem profound. The inexplicable thing is we’re all looking at the same pictures. Some people see nothing and actually believe those who do are crazy or fooling themselves. Others never stop seeing new things. They find it’s interesting to share pictures with others. Compare notes. But, interestingly enough, no two people ever see the exact same things.  I continue to work on my paint by numbers assignment. So many times I want to give up when I don’t see anything taking shape whatsoever. But then I get up, walk around it and look at it from every angle. Eventually, I come to believe it might be something and I say to myself, ‘let’s give it one more day.’