The Story of a Painting

(Part 2)

Just then the president of the Heritage Fine Arts Guild called for everybody’s attention. It was time for the art judge to announce her decisions and hand out ribbons.

From where I was standing near the back of the crowd, the ribbons looked like the ones handed out at county fairs. Great-grandma Thibault had half a dozen of them hanging on her kitchen wall for her pies and cookies. The Heritage Fine Arts judge would award ribbons for 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd place, of course, plus ribbons as well for five honorable mentions.

There must have been over thirty paintings in the running for a ribbon. It seemed like most all of their creators were in the room anxiously anticipating the outcome. Paintings are not like pies. Every one of them waiting to be judged had taken hours, months… years! to complete. A ribbon from the Heritage Fine Arts Guild was a big deal. People were nervous.

Culley Jane thought the painting of a cat that resembled our own little Russian Blue without papers would win a ribbon. And she was right! Of course. However, the first painting the judge walked up to (to announce the first honorable mention winner) was “New Perspectives.”

"Great," I thought.

And there was the artist!

Emerging from the crowd, she approached the judge to receive her ribbon looking as proud as mom did the day she bested great-grandma Thibault at the county fair.

While everybody was focused on the judge moving along from painting to painting working her way up to the 1^st place finale, I started inching my way through the crowd in the direction of my 1^st place winner.

She was standing next to a man who was beginning to gray around the temples. I assumed it was her husband. I guessed at her age, her generation. Gender and generation are the first two things that newspaper reporters think they know about a person when they’re going to write about them.

I didn’t actually count, but I’d say a high percentage of the people in the room had been born, like me, not long after the end of WWII – the so-called “Baby Boomers.” The winner of my award, however, looked to be a child of that generation – probably born in the 70s when the Boomers were in their 20s. She had not grown up watching the Donna Reed Show or Cronkite when we were going to the moon.

By the time the judge had finished, after announcing her 1^st place winner – the one of the cat that Culley Jane liked – I had positioned myself up close to my winner’s personal space.

She looked at me.

I started right in talking fast like you do when you need to explain a lot in a brief window of time. Obscured by the cascade of words pouring out of me was the disguised fear of being thought crazy, or worse, ignored.

I introduced myself and told her I owned a publishing company incorporated in the State of Colorado, Westphalia Publishing, and that on the way over to the art show in the car with my wife, Culley Jane, a retired university professor and novelist, the traffic was light and we were just moving along on a Sunday afternoon in Denver when… Snap! … out of the blue, I get this idea that I think is a GREAT idea to give out a Westphalia Art Award and write a column about the artist. If I’d’ve thought about it earlier, I said, I would have had a ribbon already made up, a blue one with gold embroidery, but that the idea had just come to me on our way to the show…

“…...  ”

“Your painting talked to me…” I hurried on. “I don’t mean like what art critics at the New York Times mean when they say a painting ‘talked’ to them. I mean, like, really, like Benjamin Franklin came out of a post office and waved at me and asked me my name. I told Culley Jane about it. She’s probably looking it up right now on her iPhone, probably thinking I’d had a migraine aura… her latest novel is about a woman born not long after the end of WWII who’s just retired and has migraine auras and has adventures with people she meets on internet dating sites for seniors…”

“Your wife is a writer?”

“We’re both writers, but she completes the novels that she starts and I’ll spend twenty years on a first paragraph. I’ve got 270,000 words of first paragraphs.”

She smiled.

She looked at the man next to her that I assumed was her husband and he smiled, too.

“But, I complete my weekly columns in the Westphalia Periodic News,” I said. “Every week. Every Thursday. I try to make it look easy, but it's hard work."

"You write a weekly column?"

“Yes, and I want to write a column about you! Because, guess what? You! are the WINNER of the 2024 Westphalia Art Award!”

Her response surprised me. Not amusement or skepticism, but like she was genuinely honored, maybe thrilled, like a winner at the county fair.

“I need to interview you,” I said.

“Interview?”

“Yes. To do a column, I have to interview you. But don’t worry. I was a newspaper reporter for over 20 years and I know what I’m doing.”

“Does your column have a name?”

“Our Story," I said. "I started out thinking that I’d call it 'My Story,' just telling about what’s going on around me here in my world in the third decade of the 21^st century. But then I got to thinking… it’s not important what I think, but what the reader and me can think together to find out what’s common to both our worlds. That’s when I decided to call my weekly column ‘Our Story.’”

She just looked at me for a moment without turning towards the man next to her. Then she nodded in the direction of the reception area, emptied of people now, but with a few cookies left on the table.

“I think we can talk in there,” she said.

(to be continued…)