Our llama barn has become an art gallery. The rules are that the paintings must be as bad as possible (or at least strange) show an interesting usage of colour or a complete misunderstanding of the concept of perspective, and they should not cost more than two dollars. They should be oil or acrylic as watercolour is too fragile for our gallery conditions. The ones on canvas board have to be varnished front and back to prevent them from warping from the dampness. Of course we don’t have any black velvet paintings. In our never-ending quest to find and display the best of the worst, we have visited a lot of garage sales and thrift shops.

The name of the barn is “Barn Toulouse” and when it became full of bad oil paintings, we had to start hanging paintings in the lower barn. Its name is the “Monet Pit”.

We have a different situation than most galleries as there are llamas wandering in and out all of the time. They are rather critical of some of the paintings, judging by the green spit on some of them. Another problem we have is that a few of our llamas love to chew on the paintings. Because of this and the wind, the paintings are fastened to the walls with screws through the frames. Also, because of security concerns we have posted guards in the gallery.

To stop the llamas from eating the paintings, we spray the paintings occasionally with a mixture of water and llama droppings. This works quite well, even though it may be construed by some as a comment on the quality of the art.

Any baby llamas that are born in the gallery automatically get an artist type name such as Picasso, Vincent, Emily Carr, or Georgia O’Keeffe (whose mother is Sarah Barnart).

To view the paintings, click on the name of the painting in the frame on the left.