Good Thing I hardly ever throw things away.

I was looking at a very old sketchbook of canvasette pages, slightly browned around the edges, this morning and saw this phone number. I looked at the first page and saw a sketch that gave me a clue that it was when I lived in Austin, Texas. What was the Chariot Hotel?

The Chariot Hotel was near I-35 and had a motel style with a big sign and noted for their pool with a waterfall. Demolished in 2008, it is now a Volvo dealership.

So the cray pas, oil crayon drawing on the first page was a sketch for a 4 x 5′ oil on canvas painting from 1980 called “Oh, did I really say that?”. The cat we had at the time laying across the top of the couch like in the sketch and a woman like me sitting on the floor at the base of the couch smacking her own head.

Our cat at the time sprawled across the top of the couch by Joyce Lieberman 1980

In 1980, while in Graduate Art School at the University of Texas at Austin, I met Darrius Mitchell. Darrius travelled as a flight attendant and had a gallery in Dallas, Texas called Rare Discoveries. He liked my work and offered representation. He was a dream come true. He would come to my Graduate Art Studio and carry away almost wet large canvases he could get on the plane back to Dallas

Dallas was a three hour car drive away.

Anyway, he sold a few paintings in my 4 x 5′ narrative figurative style of oil paintings. He must have been staying at the Chariot Hotel. Jimm remembers we met with him there.

The second page is of seating , possibly near the pool?

Chairs near a pool in cray pas on canvasette by Joyce Lieberman 1980

Have you ever used Canvasette?

The relationship with Darrius Mitchell was pretty fun, very validating. He sold several paintings. But then, of course, tragedy hit, Rare Discoveries in Dallas burned down. And this painting, “Oh, Did I Really Say That?” was one of the paintings that burned with the building.