The painting that gets the most comments

This is the painting of mine that consistently gets the most positive responses.  Well, not enough to motivate people to actually buy it.  You know how that goes.

I painted this after Hurricane Katrina and titled it: "The Three Graces".  I wanted a feeling of richness, color, and decay, which I associated with New Orleans.  The fur pieces imply both richness and decay.  Nothing is yummier to the touch than real fur.  Yet, it is part of a dead animal.  I remember the first time, as a child, that I saw one of those small mink stoles -- the ones that are the bodies of the minks, sewn together, with the heads and feet and tails still attached.  I was perhaps 10 years old, at church, and I saw a woman wearing one.  I thought, "She has a dog around her neck."  When I got closer to her I realized, "It's a dead animal!"  I though it was completely bizarre.

Hurricane Katrina was sad to me in two ways.  First, the the terrible destruction, dislocation and death.  Second, and more personally, a friend, a dear friend, emailed me her opinion of the residents of New Orleans.  Specifically, the poor, black residents of New Orleans.  I knew this friend had become more and more conservative over the years.  But, I had not yet accepted that she had tipped over into being a reactionary.  Her words were racist and classist.  I felt sick to my stomach when I read them.  I confronted her thru email.  Her reply boiled down to: "you need to figure out why you hate middle-class white people."  Considering I am a middle-class white person, that seemed strange.  I emailed back that, if I were poor and black, that would be the community that I would critique and try to make better.  But, I am white and middle-class, so that is the community I see up and personal.  That is the community I am qualified to critique.  Then I said, let's just let it be.  

Alas, the arrogance of the middle-class.  We have nothing to learn from others, we think.  They have everything to learn from us, we assume.  The middle-class sees the splinter in the eye of the poor and misses the plank of wood in its own.