Thanks to Sir Eric Wolfgang, I'm enjoying Dali's crazy, amazing book, "50 Secrets of Magic Craftmanship". Last night, before retiring, I read this:
"Secret Number 3 is that in undertaking an important pictorial work which you are anxious to bring to a successful completion and on which your heart is particularly set, you must before anything else begin it by sleeping as deeply, as soundly as it is possible for you to do."
So I retired early, slept soundly, woke up at 5:30, grabbed my sketchbook and whipped this out:
Full disclosure, the dude at bottom was illustrated the night before and is a study emulating 1960s clip art (the style of facial rendering popular at the time). Somewhat surreal, to me, although they kind of go together like the music in Django Unchained vs. the style and tone of the movie (i.e. they do and they don't. It's either incongruous to the point of absurdity, or, it's rather inspired).
Once the juices were flowing in this direction I immediately went out to the studio to pursue the Heatwave Hitch Hiker:
And, after feeding the chickens and having breakfast I made another run at it her:
This got me to thinking about all the hitch hikers I have picked up and how many, actually approached this level of attractiveness. In all honesty, I have picked up a couple young ladies who were fetching and one in particular who was loaded and made it clear she was available for extra curricular activities. I was on my way to pick up my girlfriend at the time, and pretended not to get her message, although I did kick myself later in a kind of Well-that's-not-going-to-happen-ever-again kind of way. And it didn't.
The irony is, today, if I saw someone like this on the road I would never stop. It just seems too much like a come on to get robbed or worse, but then this is a 66-year-old guy talking.
Either way, the fetching hitch hiker is an American icon. Just the pose of the cocked hip with the thumb out on a lonely road is in our DNA as a people. Or, certainly tattooed on the backside of the American male retina.
"Where ya' headed?"
—The first words every hitch hiker hears when a vehicle stops to pick them up
