Rob Clarke is 42 years old has been married for 5 years and has a two year old daughter. He has a long history of drug addiction and has been clean for 12 years. He works for a Mortuary as a Cremation Technician. He is a painter. At a early age he made a commitment to being an Artist.

These are the facts, but art is not a fact.

This arrived in my email inbox this morning. It’s for Rob Clarke’s show of paintings at Art Not Terminal gallery starting Dec. 9. I can not vouch for Clarke’s work, only the sheer rhetorical force of his press release.

Speaking of charmers, just hours after this email arrived I got a phone call from a lovely Frenchman with a thick accent who makes paintings and photographs of pink socks. “This is a way to walk on the earth with happiness and joy,” he said, adding that he has shown the work in Canada and Paris before bringing it here.

His opening is 7 pm tomorrow at Cafe Allegro, including the screening of a movie called “The Mystery of the Pink Socks,” which a friend of the Frenchman’s who works in French television made for him, he said.

I thought it was all a put-on, but no. Philippe Moncorgé is very much for real. This is his web site. Sadly, I could not find any images of the socks themselves, but I did find a listing for the show, titled Pink Socks of Earth.