Behind the Paint: The Oakland Bay and The Oakland Downtown paintings

This is a picture of a view from a hill.

This is a picture of buildings.

If these paintings look familiar, it's because they are paraded around by the highbrow people in American culture as examples for the world to follow because they are so poetic and impacty and bring all viewers to tears with their sublimeness and other good qualities.

But there's a whole back story that's in back of them, and it goes like this.

Paulette was tired from the previous day's painting, so she just wanted to have some fun and go crazy with paint without a lot of people passing by because they talk and sometimes say annoying things.  So she drove up the hill and painted these two paintings using a lot of sun-thickened linseed oil.

She parked at the bottom of a steep grade and walked half way up it slowly because it was steep and then walked over to her painting destination.  The grade was so steep that she used muscles in her legs that she didn't normally use, and this made her realize that she has muscles in her legs that go unused or neglected.

When she finished with the first painting, she painted the second one after the first, and then she walked back to her car, seeing a skunk near it's den under a rock before it saw her.  And so she stayed a good distance away from it, making noise so that it might hear her.  Then, when it did see her or hear her, it looked at her and raised its tail real high like, and Paulette said, "Howdy my little skunk friend, be nice, or I'll send you to the zoo."