The Story of a Painting

(Part 1)

Except for a couple of houses, I’ve never painted anything in my life. Even as a kid, I showed no interest in paint-by-number sets. Consequently, I know nothing about painting as art except for what I like, and then I have a hard time explaining why I like this instead of that. Usually, it’s because the painting makes me think.

Culley Jane and I were invited to an art showing and contest sponsored by the Heritage Fine Arts Guild. The paintings selected for the exhibit would be judged by an experienced judge and ribbons handed out to the winners. One of our sister-in-law Betsy’s watercolors had been selected. I like her stuff. We have a couple of her works in the house – one painting of our cats when they were kittens and another of an old pick-up truck. She’d be there with her husband, Mike, Culley Jane’s brother, who is also a retired professor and novelist, and their daughter, Taylor, who does research in a scientific laboratory.

Betsy said there would be a reception room with refreshments. I think it’s best not to judge art on an empty stomach.

In the car on our way over to the show, I told Culley Jane that I had a Great Idea! “I’ll announce a Westphalia Art Award for the best painting, judged by me because I own the company. Then I’ll write a column about the winner.”

Culley Jane said: “uh huh.”

“You wait and see. I think it’s a great idea!”

“Aren't all your ideas great ideas?”

The show was in the spacious downstairs of a public library near a part of Denver where there are lots of mansions, possibly where sports figures like John Elway live. By the time we arrived, a couple dozen people were already milling around, chatting and inspecting the paintings along the walls. We spotted Betsy and Mike and Taylor across the room. Betsy showed me where the food was.

Then I wandered out into a world I know little about. I liked Betsy’s, but on a far wall something caught my attention in between lots of fruit bowls and mountain scenes, cats and a cowboy – all created, it seemed, by people who knew what they were doing. But they weren’t making me think, just admire. Like in a Zen dream, they captured the beauty of the motionless instant, but I figure you can’t get the plot of a movie by watching it one frame at a time.

But the painting on the far wall refused to freeze its pose. Like cans of paint pointlessly splashed together on a two-dimensional surface, it flowed and dripped and mixed. It was in motion. It seemed to have an internal urge to move for no purpose other than to be something else. I blinked. A motion picture? Not going anywhere? Just going? I didn’t ask anybody around me if they noticed it, too. I didn’t want anybody thinking that I was stoned.

I started across the room, drawn like a moth towards wavelengths transitioning into and out of the spectral field of human vision. It was Chaos. Nothing familiar. Nothing named.

Halfway across the room, I thought of dismissing it as just another depressing apocryphal message about what we’d emerged from and to which we were destined to return -- the End of the World… a universe without thought, unaware of its own existence.

But then I got up close to the thing.

It’s funny the first thoughts that come into peoples’ minds. When I got my nose up close to the painting, my first thought was a memory of a Kurt Vonnegut novel I read in college. Aliens had invaded Earth and said they planned to destroy everybody unless they could be shown one good reason for not doing it. The aliens were taken to a performance of the Bolshoi ballet and the world was saved.

Up close I saw that the painting had threads of musical notation woven into it -- a “collage,” I think it’s called.

Music piercing chaos.

Music is Reason… it’s mathematical… an octave is a mathematical doubling of the frequency of a sound.

Reason shapes what we see with our eyes wide open. It sees what it creates, brings order to chaos, shapes perspective. Makes me, too. Cogito Ergo Sum.

The painting was entitled “New Perspectives.”

Even though I’d never advanced beyond drawing stick figures, I felt as though the artist was inviting me in to co-create a “new” perspective. Like in a fairy tale, dark clouds of chaos blooming in a garden. First love. I saw towns with children playing in the park, a railroad track crossing the High Plains of America, grandma saying the Rosary, spaceships exploring the great mysteries of a nighttime sky. It was beautiful! Enough for everybody and everybody with enough.

I blink.

And another painting, another story comes into focus, another first thought. I see a post office with Benjamin Franklin coming through the front door. He waves and asks me my name.

It was unnerving.

I hurriedly wove my way back through the crowded room to find Culley Jane. She would know what was happening. She knows everything and if she doesn’t know she looks it up on her iPhone.

“Do I look funny?” I asked.

“Depends on what you mean by funny.”

“Funny like in strange. Like I’d just been through an episode of the Twilight Zone.”

“Now that you mention it…”

“I have to find the artist.”

“What artist?”

I pointed to the painting across the room. “The artist who painted that. It’s the winner of the inaugural first ever Westphalia Art Award.”

(to be continued…)