Jugs with Polkadot Skirt (2015)
Watercolor on paper
20 x 28 inches

 

When my wife Sarah and I moved to New York, one of the first things we experienced was the two-and-a-half block affair for drinking water. I would walk down Columbus Ave to the Pioneer grocery store and buy two two-and-a-half gallon containers of Poland Springs water. It cost 3.99. Ephing Nestle. At the Fairway it was 4.99 plus two more long blocks uphill both ways.

Why not drink the tap?

I’m not going to get into that here, but I’ll take two water jugs please. Between the two of us, we consumed around 10 gallons a week. That’s five blocks, eight bucks and four waste containers to boot.

All this made me do something really strange and slightly crazy. I started saving the jugs like some weird hoarder. We accumulated about three months worth of them in the hall for “my project” until my crazy made me certifiably insane.

This was no big surprise to us though. Not that I was crazy or how we wanted water to be part of our process. Saving jugs was just an excuse to do something while not having enough space to build a hydroponics system in the middle of our upper west side apartment.

I was saving them for the next small apartment we would move into, our current place of residence, in Brooklyn. The big difference between here and the UWS place is the private rooftop access. When we moved out, with my bundles of empty jugs all taped together in groups of nine looking like we were going to ford the east river on the way, the doormen seriously thought we had lost it. Brooklyn, here we come.

The scene depicted here is of Sarah wearing a polkadot skirt while watering her orchids over “my project.”  It pretty well captures the essence of the strange collection; gurgling plastic jugs over the greenhouse decking, PVC pipes, air hoses and test tubes scattered about the scene. Robinson Crusoe meets Biosphere.

It has been an interesting experiment so far and I’m still not drinking the tap, even though it’s supposedly better over here. We’ve moved onto the “MegaHome” water distillation machine. Ultimately, I’d like to have it all come from the clouds. Natural.