Winner Chicken Dinner - New Art For You (NAFY)

Winners on Seven, Chicken Dinner?

While Winners on Seven (a composition painting) is a commentary on the approach people take to achieve success, the painting also visualizes the phrase exclaimed to celebrate a victory, “winner winner chicken dinner”! Since that term is aligned to lingo for the game of craps, a popular origin of the term is that a chicken dinner at a Las Vegas casino in the 1930s used to cost around $2, the same amount as a standard bet. So, if you won a bet, you won a chicken dinner!

Winners on Seven (Watermarked) Product Image — Winners on Seven

As for Winners on Seven, the painting features the number seven, an early prime number in the series of positive integers. The number seven has symbolic associations in religion, mythology, superstition, and philosophy. Seven is the number of perfection, completeness, security, safety, and rest. In the Bible, God created the world in six days and used the seventh day to rest. The seven wonders of the world, the seven days in a week, the seven colors in the rainbow, the seven notes on a musical scale, the seven letters in the Roman numeral system, and so on. 777 is used in slot machines to identify a jackpot.

While the Winners on Seven painting visualizes a casino theme, the painting also features the 777 jackpot throughout its composition. I am often asked what’s going on in my paintings. My response is typically “it’s a Rorschach inkblot test”, meaning you see what you see according to your thinking process while I may see something totally different according to my thinking process. However, for the purpose of this post, here’s how I composed this work of art.

In Winners on Seven, the male and female subjects visualize their respective financial dreams while sitting or standing on the symbolic methods each uses to achieve their success. Both characters appear on a round tabletop consisting of seven colors organized according to seven rings and seven propeller shapes that divide the surface of the tabletop. Each color spirals inward, meaning the first color in the outer ring of the tabletop is the second color in the next inner ring and the third color in the next inner ring and so on. There are seven rows of lights above the casino. Below the tabletop is an upside-down nighttime cityscape of Atlantic City, New Jersey. The casino theme extends above the tabletop and divides each subject’s dream. Also appearing on the tabletop is a pair of dice showing the number eleven and a pair of cards showing the number twenty-one which, along with the characters, are all “Winners on Seven”. So, in this painting, each winning character gets their own “chicken dinner”. So, which character are you?