Friday Jones Studio — The Story Behind the Work

Glass Ceiling Cha Cha

On legs, ceilings and the extraordinary audacity of Charo.

The painting began, as so much of consequence does, with a woman refusing to behave. Specifically: Charo — flamenco guitar virtuosa, certified Cuchi Cuchi girl, fellow Capricorn to Dolly Parton and myself, and at eighty-two years of age, still prancing. On heels. With, one imagines, absolutely no interest in your opinion about it.

She arrived in America from Spain in the late sixties carrying a guitar, a dream and a personality so incandescent that it promptly obscured, for several decades and to the classical world's considerable loss, one of the most technically dazzling flamenco players alive. Beauty and vivacity, it turns out, can be a glass ceiling all their own — the kind installed not by enemies but by admirers, which is somehow worse. The world took one look at Charo and decided it preferred the spectacle to the substance. Charo, for her part, gave them the spectacle and kept the substance entirely for herself. This is, on reflection, a masterclass in strategy.

On the source material

The painting was born from an Instagram screenshot — that most democratic and least romantic of artistic triggers. There she was: eighty-two, heeled, mid-prance, possessed of legs that have apparently not received the memorandum about octogenarian dignity. The image was so purely, defiantly alive that the only reasonable response was 30 by 40 inches of textured acrylic in orange and gold. Vibrant colors for a vibrant woman. The ceiling, in this rendering, is strictly decorative.

The painting in the world

Glass Ceiling Cha Cha debuted alongside its companion canvas Go Go, Girl! at the Tenth Annual International Women's Day Exhibition at One Art Space in Tribeca, New York — an all-women show curated with the sort of intentionality that makes March feel genuinely like a reckoning rather than a corporate memo. The reception was, by all measures including decibel count, a success. The paintings generated what I have chosen to regard as an extraordinary volume of unsolicited portrait commissions, better known as selfies. I accept this as the sincerest available form of contemporary critical praise.

The work traveled further than the gallery walls. March 2026 found me waxing creatively matriarchal on MSNBC because apparently the spirit of Women's History Month, like Charo herself, declines to be contained to a single venue. The Times Square Chronicles and The Knockturnal both ran features. The AP wire, that most venerable of distribution mechanisms, picked it up. I will not pretend I wasn't pleased. I was very pleased.

Despite current political appearances — and in the powerful spirit of what I can only describe as strategic optimism — there has never been a better time in history to be a girl. I invite you to repeat this to yourself until it becomes unreasonably convincing.

All of which is to say: this painting is not decorative, though it will look extraordinary on your wall. It is not merely a tribute, though it honors a woman who has earned considerably more tribute than she has received. It is an argument, rendered in orange and gold and the particular swagger of a woman in heels who has been underestimated for sixty years and found the whole arrangement rather amusing.

Charo is still prancing. The ceiling, as it turns out, was always optional.

Medium: Textured acrylic on canvas Dimensions: 30" × 40" × 2”

Original $2,000

Exhibited: IWD 2026, One Art Space, Tribeca NYC