Serendipitous that the greenest of of all the Muppets (well, outside of Kermit) comes back atcha in a new 16×20″ acrylic painting on St. Patty’s Day.
DID YOU KNOW: Oscar the Grouch is actually orange, but his fur turned green due to an accumulation of grime and dirt. (I didn’t make that up!)
For years, I’d seen this hideous canvas in my parents garage. It was navy blue with a rough and tumble green square occupying a quandrant of space. Clearly, this wasn’t a finished piece, and to be honest, I don’t think I painted it at all. I had a number of other shitty paintings in there, but those at least had my panache. This one was just a barf.
I turned that old trash into new trash by painting the Sesame Street’s triumvirate of trash: Oscar the Grouch, Bruno the Trashman and Slimey the Worm.
The actual Muppet costume of Bruno has been retired when it was disintegrating in storage, so that’s a guy we probably won’t ever see on Sesame Street again. Oscar is still a mainstay, and Slimey – a remote-controlled worm – over the years, has developed a voice of his own. I love this clip of them:
This piece was painted last Wednesday night, while waiting for a PowerPoint deck to open on my desktop at work. The Mac beach ball of doom kept spinning, so I kept painting. Next thing I know it’s 10PM and I’ve got another Muppet canvas completed. And I also redeemed myself for the awful Oscar painting I finished in the summer of 2013, a few scant months before my daughter was born. (That was never posted on this site.)
The original is available here. The entire cast of Muppets I’ve painted is here. And finally, I’ve also got Pinterest galleries for the Muppets and Sesame Street.
