Hi,
This is a painting of an old hill tribe lady who came down to the market to sell what she and her family grew. That day she had several kinds of flowers and a little vegetable.
It is my weakness to go to a local open market (my favorite, I rather put up with noises and a little dirty than go to a super market if I have a choice.) to see lives and everything else that happens. If I see children and old people selling things, I would do my best to buy even though the items sold are not what I need. So, many times I ended up with too many flowers, local fruits even the food I normally don’t eat. In Thailand, the neighbors of my mother usually ended up with those things. These flowers in the paintings could fetch around $15 and the home grown vegetable probably around $5 the most, but that is enough for a little gas and food that day for a family.
I am 60 years old and took my retirement from a job indoors (Computer Scientist) at 53 and I have an empathy for anyone older to sit and sell things at the market which I never can do. For children, because I was never had to make a living when growing up, I buy things from them so that they can do something else more enjoyable, not to have to make a couple bucks, IMO.
I used several ref. pictures, used oil and knife and airbrush. This lady’s skin was still quite good, hardly any age spots, just sags around her eyes which made the eys seem smaller. She had betel nuts in her mouth and I tried to make her mouth look like she had it and stain on her lips.
At one time, way back around 65-70 years ago, the black teeth stained by betel nuts were considered pretty, especially for women. The Thai, Indonesia and Indian literatures always praised the teeth with color on both men and women. Around WWII, the governemt of Thailand (being embarassed to the Western World) tried to get people to stop chewing the betel nut and ordered the betel nut trees to be cut down and many, many people had the withdraw symtoms real badly that they planted them clandestinely and the price hit sky high.
I have known the information because my mother chews the betal nuts, she is 84 going 85 so she was a teenager just around the time before the government ordered them to quit and she was stuck. Today her teeth are not so good so she mashed all ingredient down first.She'd rather skip a meal than a ball of betel nut!!! When all these old people pass away, Thailand will not be under the curse of betel nuts but the Burmese, hill tribe people and many Indians still chew them.
At MaeSod a border town between Burma and Thailand, there are signs in every street that say "Do NOT Spit Betel Nut Juice, fine 100 Baht."
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