The regrettable art project.

The wall in my dining room is kind of weird. It's a big white wall, and right in the middle of it is a phone jack. Weird spot, huh? I guess if I had a wall phone it would be fine -- I'm imagining it being one of those old school ones like on I Love Lucy, where Lucy would pick up the phone and say, "Hello operator? Get me KLondike 5-1212."

Instead, I've opted to hang some of my artwork. I really don't have anything to fill the wall so I came up with the genius idea of hanging three same-size canvases all painted red. And since I needed to do it on the cheap, I went back home and dug up out of my closet some crappy old paintings I did in college.

These were serious crap paintings. In college, I treated a lot of the painting assignments like term papers -- rushed and done the night before they were due. The three I pulled out of the closet were no exception.

One was of a beach scene where I had a can of SPAM under an umbrella. What the hell?

Another was of a "plant-woman" growing out of a vase. It looked like a poor man's Swamp Thing with tits.

And the last one was of a desert landscape that ended up looking like a background to a Roadrunner cartoon.

So what I did was take those paintings and wrapped pieces of duct tape across each of them. And then I spray painted each one red.

They look horrible.

Well ...so far. The spray painting was just a base coat to cover up the old paint and tape. Next I'm going to buy some red acrylics and paint over the canvases by hand to get a really rich red color on top of the underlying textures.

It'll probably still look horrible. But I'm determined to see this project through and hang those three canvases on my wall to cover up that stupid phone jack.