Finishing the details

Reservoir No. 3. Oil on panel, 8x8. 

My show with Laura Maolo opens Friday at the Lighthouse Gallery in Groton, and Chris Rose, gallery curator, would like my work there on Tuesday. There's an awful lot to do between now and Tuesday, and some of it won't get done. Oh, well!

For reasons I do not understand, I seem to be incapable of signing a painting while I'm painting it. And then, of course, I forget. So tonight, one of my tasks is to sign a whole bunch of paintings and hope hard that those signatures will dry quickly!

I do wish I had a shorter name. I always envied my friend and fellow copy editor Ev Hu, who has the shortest name I've ever heard. Perfect for a painter! I tried initials, but the c and the j either end up looking like a lollipop or something rated X. I tried many capital Js, too, and they all just looked dumb. So I have settled on a lower-case "jacobson."

In the distant future, when I'm world-famous, collectors will fight over those capital "J" "Jacobson" signatures. Prices will double and triple for the few paintings with that big letter. Maybe I'll throw in a few capital-J signatures in the next five years, just to confound the universe.