Demoiselle H. H.
When this flyer for a show of Detroit artists flew in though my mail slot, I said "Wow! Somebody else is putting cut out figures on the road." I immediately recognized the figure as being a central personage in Picasso's 1907 painting, "Demoiselles D'Avignon", a seminal painting in the orthodoxy of Modern Art. However, the more I looked at the flyer, I was not convinced it was an actual cut out placed on the shoulder of the expressway. There's something odd about the light and the figure has been reversed to better fit the composition of the roadside scene. I called Lynn Galbreath, one of the twelve women artists in the show at the Ceres Gallery in New York and the designer of the advertisement. She readily confessed that it was a Photoshop creation. She was delighted that I wanted to make her idea a reality by cutting and painting the figure, life sized, from half inch plywood. I explained that, in the past, all my Hitch Hikers were of living people who agreed to take temporary possession of their Hitch Hiker, write something on its back, and abandon it. Since this Hitch Hiker has no living* counterpart in reality, I asked Lynn to accept the role which she did.
Before leaving me for Lynn, the Demoiselle H. H. did me the service of escorting me to a few spots around Detroit.
