Watercolor with Prismacolor pencil, 15 in. x 18, matted and framed. Shortly after midnight on New Year's Day, after my wife and children had gone to bed, I was sitting in my comfy chair in the basement sipping a Scotch and reading an art book, when I looked over where my guitar was leaning up against my amp and thought to myself, "That would make a nice still life." So I grabbed my watercolor block and laid into it. Though I worked on this painting over a period of many other nights, what I captured quickly in that moment of inspiration seemed to take hold and show through. This piece really looks back to a body of work that I did a few years back that I loosely referred to as casual still lives. The idea behind a casual still life is that the objects that I choose to paint are found and are painted from their existence in every day life. In other words, I make no attempt to set up a still life-rather I look for objects, usually around my own home, that happen to already be placed in a pleasing arrangement. One other interesting note about this painting-the faces on the guitar are Mr. Yuck stickers. I'm not sure you can still get these, but when I was a teenager, you could call the Poison Control Center and ask them to send you these stickers-the idea was to place them on objects that contained harmful substances so that children could learn to identify items in the household that they should not play with. I placed them on the faces of the tone and volume knobs of my guitar with the tongue of the Mr. Yuck pointing toward the indicator for these knobs so that when I turned them down, I still had a visual indicator while playing of where they were set.