Fairytale Narratives

When Fact and Fable Collide

48"x48" oil on masonite panel, Fall 2014

______Grocery shopping and driving have so many connections they probably met on eHarmony and dated a few times. When you're shopping for your canned foods, baked goods, and raw fruits and veggies, you want to push your cart at a constant speed, yield at intersections, and drive on the proper side of the isle, which could essentially be considered two-lanes sized for two carts to pass side by side, sans yellow stripe. You also don't want to shop under the influence, or the grocery shop cops will swoop down from the tops of shelves, place little yellow wheel clamps on your cart, and force you to use a shopping basket for the rest of your food-buying excursion.

______That being said, don't even try to free the lobsters from their glass prison as you saunter by the ground meat. The grocery store cops will scoff and not be amused. Though the beady eyes of the lobsters glint preciously and plead, "SOS!" it's best to turn away and recall how their brains are but a bundle of nerves comparable to those of a cockroach.

Whisking Sugar Lumps 

48"x24" oil on masonite panel, Fall 2014

______Of course, while grocery shopping, you're always going to run into those grocery shop drivers. You know the ones. 

______The ones that take up a whole isle, probably rationalizing that it's an opportune time to tweet about how the Honey Bunches of Oats were moved two cereal brands over, and the struggle was so incredibly real, gosh dangit! And now the world has to know, or at least their twelve followers do, even though nine of them are spam accounts and one is a goat pun account that last updated two years ago.

______Then there are the ones who put their cart in front of the bagged spinach leaves you so desire, only to wander all the way over to another vegetable, leaving their cart, purse, and screaming child for you to frown at until their slow, soul crushing return. 

______Then there's the old couple that slowly surveys each piece of lettuce as if they are picking out a wedding gown. "Oh no," the boisterous little wife says, shaking her head and raising her frail hands in defense, shaking them like wheat crops being struck by Western wind. "These leaves are far too wilted. We need something sturdier, but not too crisp and white as those, nay!" The quiet husband nods in agreement. He knows by now not to argue with his marshmallow haired wife whose skin sags like the floppy lips of a dog. 

The Organisms Are Introduced to Cotton Candy

48"x24" oils on masonite panel, Fall 2014

______The robo-zoomer is what I could classify myself as: my movements are intentional and swift as I dexterously zoom from foodstuff A to foodstuff B, like a pirate sniffing gold on the seas. I have a robot-like stare that resembles that calculates the quickest path to my next target, considering the obstacles that are humans and cart road-blocks. I go in. I go out. I occasionally stop to sniff the packaged roses that sit conveniently by the chocolate-covered almonds.

______There's the gazer. They glaze their slitted eyes over the selection hundreds of times like a lecherous man surveying patrons at a gas station even though he or she shops there every week and that same product hasn't moved an inch. It's in the same spot. Really. Your canned mushrooms haven't grown wings and flown to another isle.

______The post-workout chick. She's got her ponytail streaming through a cap, her snazzy printed leggings hugging her perfect gluteus maximus, and her neon Nikes keeping up with her quick pace as she moves the cart with one hand, cradles a small child in the other, and still manages to pin her Otterbox-cased iPhone 6 to her ear and carry a conversation. This girl is going places.

______What kind of shoppers do you notice?