recycled art

Here's another piece of recycling bafflement from Highland Park.   Sunday afternoons are when some of the prize pickings go out onto the kerb - but this painting is unusually idiosyncratic among the dilapidated chairs, the dented filing cabinets, the children's plastic tricycles, the very unreadable paperbacks.   Its status is unclear - did someone get tired of painting it?   Did someone get tired of it, period - assuming, possibly, that it's finished?   Who ever wanted to paint or own it in the first place?   And (most interesting of all) - is it still there, and if so, what does it look like now that we've had a monstrous downpour in a thunderstorm?

But this had me thinking: mightn't it be a good idea to organize a picture swap?   Not on S. 4th, necessarily, if this is what's on offer...but maybe a Murray Hall picture swap ... we must all have various perfectly decent paintings and prints and photographs and other images that don't quite make it onto our walls any more - and which we aren't quite going to get our act together to put out for a garage sale ... but if we could bring in our art work - put one down, take one up ... for each swap, donate $5, say, to, say, Rutgers Against Hunger ... by the time I'd reached home, I'd turned this into a nationwide event...  Perhaps someone would like a print of a painting of some ballet dancers, leaning against a damp Highland Park tree?