Ta da! A salmon surprise, indeed! Revealed to you at last! This is the salmon form the artists chosen for the Art Gallery of Mississauga's & Office of the Arts "Salmon Run Project" have been given. #158415 is mine, all mine! But there are more surprises in store!

Surprise #1. I was expecting an artist designed cast , not the taxidermist model this is. Still happy this project is up and "run"ning. A community sculpture project first for Mississauga!

Surprise #2. Fellow participants Sonja Hidas and Carmen Hickson were curious as to what I was going to do with the extra fins. Fins? What fins? Well, ah ha! Under that cardboard at the tail, guess what I found -

Surprise # 3. This should be called BIG surprise #3., GIANT surprise #3. There are seam lines from the casting process all over the fish! And the fins! This is a lot of prep work, people! This cast appears to be of fibreglass (protect your lungs!) , possibly some  plaster and filled  with foam. Sanding will have to be done in a well ventilated area, i.e. outside and with proper tools and protection. So, I readied my Mastercraft reciprocating sander, my mask, and my goggles. And it's still winter here, folks, so I wore somebody else's coat .Wasn't going to get my own "resiny"  LOL.  So here's a sight that would definitely scare the neighbourhood children, not to mention the fish.

Here's the tools in action.

Here's me in the cold in action.

Surprise #4. Quite possibly to you, but not to all the professional visual artists out there. Creating art for a living requires discipline, a broad selection of know how, tenaciousness, the ability to laugh at life (in Canada, we sure can't laugh because of the  money)and remain ever optimistic (the tenacious part). I will laugh out loud as I spend a second day in tenacious hope that this flipping fish will be "fin" ished (Dam it, Jim, I am a painter, not a sander) so that I can actual begin my proposal, submit it and get back to the studio.

No surprise there.