18 x 24 x .75" Original oil painting on wood panel box. 
 
This painting is part of my deconstructed realism series. I've been interested in taking things apart lately. Sometimes people. Changing shapes, pushing boundaries, stripes of cooler colors juxtaposed next to warmer just to see what happens. Fun things I think. 
 
In this one I took some photos of this stalk of a sea grape plant and it's cool shadow shapes outside of a gallery here in Sarasota, then cut through it with geometric shapes. The one is part of its address. The iron is utterly random. My studio mate Jay is a brilliant classical realist and is completely bothered every time I start cutting up things like this so to make him crazy I threw in the iron. "Now you've just ruined it!" he said laughing.
 
I don't know why I kept thinking of this avocado green vintage steam iron my mom had when I was a kid, it kept popping in my head like a demon I had to exorcise. So I painted it in. To be honest, it was much more about that cord than it was about the iron. I think it plays with the shapes of the plant. And there's something about the tension in the iron butting up against the edge of the painting. Not sure what that's about... it just felt right. Sometimes paintings just need an iron.