Peanut Horror

Text says,‘A Peanut Kiss Before Dying!'(A play on the title of the Ira Levin Book) Acrylic painting on about 16″X16″ Gallery wrapped stretched canvas so no frame is necessary. THIS IS NOT a piggyback piece but a rare original breen. To bid on this piece, go HERE.

The first inkling I ever had that nuts could be dangerous came to me through the song “Ate a peanut” when I was a toddler. Synopsis: ate a peanut last night, it was rotten, ate it anyway, died, went to heaven. I actually sang this song once while eating peanuts, scrutinizing each one extremely carefully. I’ve always loved nuts and eaten lots and lots of them, yet, the danger was always there, a rotten one. But then again, you could eat any kind of rotten food and get sick or die. When little breen came along I learned all about peanut allergies. I was severely reprimanded for sending the tyke in with a highly toxic p+b sandwich one day, and I always thought the school was over-reacting(until I heard the story you’ll read further down the page). For those of you that don’t have kids, every class seems to have at least one or several children who are allergic to peanuts. If they eat a little bit of a peanut, or something with peanut dust in it, they could die! This seems to be a new modern problem! I do not remember anyone with peanut allergies when I was a kid. One of my son’s friends carries a hypo everywhere he goes just in case it needs to be driven into his thigh to counteract an accidental nut exposure.

A month or two ago, a news story broke which felt like an urban legend, but was true. A 15 year old Canadian girl died after kissing her boyfriend, who had eaten a peanut butter sandwich hours earlier. This incident has been haunting me for weeks. We’re told our food is KILLING us. Not just peanuts, but meat, carbohydrates, anything you can think of, is bad for us if not outright poisonous. This story, though tragic, really brings this issue to the height of absurdity. It also has a fairy-tale quality to it and I decided to deal with it Mexican retablo style. It’s a touchy subject, not really funny, kind of in bad taste, but, well, I’m me.

Mr. Peanut is hovering over Sleeping Beauty, ready to give her a kiss, while death, peering out of a dense underbrush of peanut plants, weeps. Jimmy Carter is a peanut bug, and he is crying as well. Poison peanut foods are highlighted on the right, while a monument on the left wraps around the painting.

Posted by eddiebreen on February 27, 2006

https://eddiebreen.wordpress.com/2006/02/27/peanut-horror/