Hobo Sign of Distress

This painting came to me in the Palm Springs desert as I contemplated the idea of storm underlying calm. It is in a high key color pallet. The title came to me as I envisioned a flag in  this landscape that would express the coming conflict and I thought of the Hobo sign language used by the hobos in the 1930s. They had a hieroglyphical  system of sign language that they drew or smeared on landmarks along the road. The sign for distress is two women under one roof. I discovered (I may lose my feminist credentials here) that the one of the Chinese characters for distress is also this notion of two women, one roof.