Pink Ball Centre Pocket

Recently I did a painting showing a curvy woman in a tight dress (First Dates Nerves, Dressed In Curves.) One of my friends rang to say he liked it so much he had experienced some mild mamba movements in his undergarments. I took this as a compliment and it fired me up to do another salacious one. Here it is: a man and woman obviously on the ascent to mutual carnal hedonism.

I daubed in the couple and was just going to have the woman bent over a kitchen table with a bottle of champagne on it. However a title presented itself as if by magic: I was watching “Doc Hollywood” where Michael J Fox plays a plastic surgeon who crashes his car while driving through a small mid-American hill-billy town and is forced to work there temporarily. He soon meets Lula, and, being a slick city-dwelling mover-groover, has a bet with a local man that he can seduce her within a week. The man says, “Lula? Pink ball in the centre pocket?” I thought yep that’s it, that’s the title. I painted the woman bent over a snooker table. This was difficult as I had left scant room on the canvas. To give the viewer an idea it was a snooker table I painted in one hefty mahogany leg, green baize and a pink ball near the far centre pocket. Thanks Doc Hollywood.

This woman boasts quite fleshy thighs, not those scrawny anorexic flamingo ones you see in the media. I sat on a bench in the middle of Todmorden and did a quite survey of the next twenty pairs of women’s legs that walked by me. Apart from four, all the legs were quite sturdy (gladly - not a fan of legs that compare to knotted rope.)

As there were no faces to do (which always need lots of work) I did this small canvas pretty quickly. I was going to have the man’s hand on the lady’ back but I try to stay away from painting fingers.