Now on Craigslist: Jeremy Renner and a slow loris

Emily semi-recently purchased and has been refurbishing a house, and is obsessed with the amazing things she can find for very cheap on Craigslist: Large, formal oil paintings of small dogs! Six-foot-long taxidermy mahi-mahi! Scale replicas of the Nike of Samothrace! Sometimes there's something so strange or interesting that, despite not being able to justify buying it, she's compelled to find out more. 

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Today, I talked to Nicole Lombardi, who's the director of marketing for a commercial construction management firm in Center City. Her posting, followed by our conversation: 

Emily: So this painting is awesome. How did you come to own it?

Nicole: I actually painted it! My day job is marketing, but on the side I do freelnce graphic design and art (and I'm a fiction writer, I have a few ebooks on Amazon). In my spare time, I enjoy painting for fun. I first picked it up about two years ago, and around that same time Avengers had come out, so I was really into Jeremy Renner—

I mean, who isn't. 

I know, right? Anyway, he was on this television show that only lasted for one season called The Unusuals. A friend and I pored through the whole series, and then she and I were talking about what the second season might have been like. And, like you do, we started imagining this bizarre series of events that would have happened to the characters in the second season. [Laughs.] And all of these plot elements tied together around Jeremy Renner having a slow loris that escaped from the zoo. I don't remember exactly how the Christmas tree and the being in outer space got into the painting, it just needed some more weird stuff. [Laughs.]

But it was good practice! I painted it over a period of maybe two or three days, then got a fancy frame for it and decided to hang it on the wall. 

[Laughs.] It's really very good! I sent a link to a friend, and at first she couldn't see the image for some reason, she could only read the text. When she did finally see the photo, she was, like, "Wow! That's way better than I expected it to be!" So how does one go about painting a recognizable Jeremy Renner?

I don't have any formal training, so most of the stuff that I paint, I tend to use reference material. So I found a picture of him that I like, and went into Photoshop and did a photo composite of an image of him and an image of the loris, and did a grid on the wood panel and penciled in the lines. I was actually surprised, because I'm a decent artist but not a great one, that when people look at the painting they mostly immediately recognize who it is. That's kind of a huge thing for me.

Why are you selling it? 

My husband and I are actually redecorating the first floor of our house — have you ever seen the movie Alien? The interiors of the ship have this very retro-futuristic look, the future as it was imagined in the late '70s. We're redoing the living room to have that kind of look, and the painting just doesn't fit down there anymore. 

My husband still really likes it, and if I can't sell it he wants to move it up into the hallway where we have some other artwork displayed, but... I like to get rid of the art after a while. I do it, I enjoy it, I keep it for a bit, and then I try to pass it off onto other people. I have another canvas of a similar size that I'm doing now, it's an owl in a business suit posed sort of like on a business magazine cover — that's what'll probably go up if I ever finish that one. But Jeremy has to go somewhere in the meantime. 

[Laughs.] But you're not in any particular hurry to sell. 

Yeah, my husband wants to keep it, so it's not a huge, urgent matter for me. [Laughs.]