Homegrown Video paints nude Stephanie Swift
“Where did you get that picture of me to work with?” Stephanie Swift asked me the question and I tried to come up with at least one of the excuses that I had been anxiously rehearsing in preparation for this moment. Unfortunately, everything that I thought I might say sort of twisted into a heap of umms and ahhhs when it tried to pass from my brain to my tongue and all I could say was, “Well, that is a great question.”
I thought about the artist, Mark. He was an amazing talent with a couple of crates of spray paint and a nozzle collection suited to conveying every nuance a brush stroke might be capable of rendering. He could get detail and texture and lines out of a can of spray paint, stunningly classic neo realism, a regular DaVinci of the pressurized paints. Everyone who knew his work which was in graffiti murals on buildings all over the world told me that I was lucky to get him to paint our trade show booth. They couldn’t believe he was actually doing a piece for, shame, shame, shame, an amateur porn company.
I remember trying to talk to him when he had been working, one part painting, another part smoking, another drinking beer, in the dense noxious fumes of his studio. He was sort of unintelligible. He peered from heavily lidded eyes that occasionally would widen. He seemed to look around at things that were only visible to him and everyone who has recently eaten a bucket of peyote washed down with a keg of suds. Whatever was there didn’t seem to readily present any danger to me but I couldn’t be certain. Who could know what type of demon might suddenly possess the guy and control his behavior, suddenly turning him into a slobbering, seething, raving mad Englishman. I certainly didn’t feel lucky trying to get him to finish the painting by our deadline. Homegrown Video could definitely not show up at the biggest trade event of the year with a half painted booth. Unfortunately, all our conversations seemed sort of one sided since apparently so many years of using spray paint altered his brain to the point where conversation required an advanced degree of obscure dialects in the language of mumbling.
“Why did you paint Stephanie Swift?”
“Mmrrmwu? I wasn owngone erm doan painsteswift.” It sounded sort of Gaelic but I thought he was saying that he didn’t know who Stephanie Swift was. No way to be sure which meant I had to be careful responding. I decided it was best to just talk as if I hadn’t actually completely finished what I had to say before.
“She is that porn star that was working with us but now isn’t and… How can you not know who she is when you painted her picture right there? She is not going to be in our booth at the show; she is going to be working for our competition… and we are going to look pretty frigging funny promoting her when she is not even going to be at our booth.”
“SurreyMeht.” Mark answered, and continued. “I cuddoerm mek… mumble, slur, babble…pay me more.”
That last part made too much sense.
Tags: homegrown, homegrown amateur, homegrown video, stephanie swift