Deep In The O.K. Corral

March 15, 2011

Grabbed a painting out of my failure pile this morning and tweaked the whispy, ghost-like nature of the figure. Lost it, found it again, worried about overworking (ironic because I gave up on it the first time because it was, ahem, overworked). Anyway, that led to this scnenario.

Mickey's Dreamgirl Is In The House
She came to Mickey Free in a dream, walking through the abandoned adobe, her feet barely touching the cold, packed earth.

Not too shabby. Got some ghost-like attributes. She's a little bit too much Vegas stripper, but then I would imagine Mickey would have responded well to that style of muse.

Today is the anniversary of the Benson Stage Robbery, that led indirectly to the O.K. Corral fight. Yesterday, I went home for lunch and whipped out a little study I call "Deep In The Lot."

This is based on an actual photograph of Fly's side yard (most likely taken by Fly himself). The photo belongs to Steve Elliott of Tombstone and shows a burro standing in the space between Fly's boarding house and the small house west of there. Take out the burro and put in the frenzied figures of eight men and two horses, in an 18 feet space, and you have a ground view seat at the most famous gunfight in Old West history.

Of course this portrays the event more as an side-yard, alley shootout, rather than an open field epic showdown, but then that is the reality of the historical scene, not the myth. Gee, I wonder what ol' JFK has to say about this?

"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive and unrealistic."
—John F. Kennedy