This IS My Happy Face

I started with the loosest and smallest of sketches for this piece which is why it took on a life of its own while I was painting it. I do consider myself an expressionist more than, say, a surrealist, though I do think life is becoming more and more surreal---or is that unreal? I also think a lot of current surrealist painters to be, frankly, less surreal than they think they are. But that is just my viewpoint, after all. This is a 12 by 16 inch acrylic painting on gallery-wrapped canvas. It may have been somewhat inspired by a conversation I had with an old friend recently when I said I had trouble smiling. He said, "You do smile, you know." And I replied, "I find difficulty doing so on command." This is another tiny fragment of that Original Jones Art that is slowly creating a mosaic of my life here in that lovely and easily navigable Austin, Texas.