Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.
Woody Allen

Ah the scarecrow, old suit of clothes stuffed with hay and tacked up on a post, Standing all alone in some farm field keeping the crows at bay and waiting for, I don’t know, some girl dressed like a rural Paris Hilton in a gingham dress and ruby slippers like she’s off to the hunt on a Saturday night. But what if the scarecrow’s clothes weren’t stuffed with hay? What if the scarecrow’s clothes were filled with their original owner? Someone who had met with foul play, and been hung up in the middle of a large farm field, hard by the interstate. The crime victim, exposed to the glare of a hundred passing windshields, undiscovered. Hiding in plain sight. And what if that lonely scarecrow was in fact- an investment banker?

Then crop yields would probably drop 40%.

This painting came from an oil wash exercise in which I applied loose washes to a board coated with gesso. No preconceived ideas here, just throw some paint around and see what you come up with. Kind of like a sideways, speed painted, Rorschach test except the artist creates both the inkblot and the interpretation. The board was gessoed with enough texture that some shapes immediately began to suggest themselves when I began removing/adding and playing around. Once I had determined that the scarecrow figure was where I was going to take this I continued shaping things until I had a monochrome version of the painting above. When the oil paint dried, these are thin washes so the paint dried quickly, I went over the top with acrylic glazes and built up color getting more opaque with the lights and glazing in the darks. I finished up by scanning the painting into Photoshop and adding extra texture around the ground area and a glow to the moon and stars.