She Could Have Kicked the Moon

She Could Have Kicked the Moon is an interpretation of the mural described in Tom Robbins's Skinny Legs and All, in the section of the novel 'The Seventh Veil,' when formerly blocked painter Ellen Cherry Charles goes on a weekend-long painting bender and paints a vast, 11x14' mural on the wall of the restaurant where she works.

I first read Skinny Legs and All when I was a creative-writing undergraduate, shortly after the novel came out, so it must have been around 1991 or '92. Robbins' writing of this bodily experience of painting astonished me and allured me with what I felt like it must be to be a painter, and I softly envied the painters I knew with the feeling that they had access to that life. What it must feel like to channel such energy! 

Rereading Skinny Legs and All this year 2025, I had a moment of reckoning: would it be possible to paint this impossible painting? To compose it with all the elements within it and the feeling Mr Robbins describes? Had anyone ever tried? I could try! So I set myself this impossible task and aside from the size of the work, even tried to replicate the conditions including limiting myself to the colors he mentions in Ellen Cherry Charles's paint-shopping spree, sometimes drinking rum-and-cokes which relaxed me. 

'Despite its complexity, its nocturnal richness, there was something slaphappy if not slapdash about it, something careless and childlike. itch as it might with stellar information, buckle though it might under a weight of ashes, adobe, and bone, it also was as topsy-turvy as a nursery rhyme; it was kachina pinball, an episode from chipmunk television.'