Showboat is the grandfather of all musicals. It's the first great show with a book or a plot. The Showboat is a floating circus of theater, but the ex-slaves who work below decks are less than enamoured. Time keeps rolling forward, and the river keeps flowing against them.
This was another painting I regarded as a failure. Looking at it now, I hate it less. I think that I forgot how painful the song 'Ol Man River' is meant to be. Instead, I was originally going for...well, I'm not sure. That's the problem. I think I wanted to see what my boat might look like--which is hardly justification enough for the picture's existance. The sky reminds me of the muddiness I used to get out of my prismacolors in high school. All in all, I'm pleased to have this one behind me. "Colorizing", for all of its benefits, has started to gray my pallette. I'm still working on that! But I did luck into a certain kind of celebratory somberness. That's a happy accident.
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