Inner Child #1: Roses at Sunset

Inner Child #1: Roses at Sunset

This image need a bit of explanation:

First, a few years before Dad died, so he must have been late 90s, Christine and I took him over to Long Grove, a little village 45 miles or so northwest of Chicago that, at the time featured a couple of nice art galleries. We were walking through one, where patrons were murmuring comments among themselves, when we heard Dad remark, clearly and from across the room, “I wouldn’t hang that in my toilet!”

In his defense, age and fading filters aside, he shared the notion with many of us who spent our lives lecturing to rooms full of college students, that he could say whatever he wanted whenever, and however, he wanted. But we scurried over, decided it was time for lunch and beat a hopefully graceful retreat.

The object of his assessment was, admittedly, a rather garish abstract and my reaction would have been along the same lines, but more acoustically restrained. Perhaps more accurately, neither of us understood what the artist was attempting to convey.

Which leads me to the second part of my explanation of today’s image. I get daily posts from a website called Artsy. It is an online gallery which lets me know when I can bid on an Andrew Wyeth or a Hudson School piece for 5 or 6 figures, as I listed those among my “preferences.” But they also show, seemingly randomly, other images - images that call my father’s Long Grove review to mind.

I have no idea how they select those additional images, but I try to remember my own, more gentle artist-centric assessment - I just didn’t understand what the artist was trying to communicate. Which for some reason got me thinking about the images that parents lovingly display on refrigerator doors around the world. Works of their young artists, the communicative intent of which was no doubt explained and is now shared among the whole family.

OK, now here is the leap of faith we have to agree to regarding the current image. “What,” I asked myself, “would I draw, or perhaps better, would have drawn, when I was six or seven?” A naive version of the images I currently labor over? And do those images still exist somewhere down some dusty pathway, in some neglected corner of my cortex? So I opened my trusty, but also sadly neglected, Strathmore 9 by 12 inch sketch pad and a simple set of markers. And a few days later out jumped Inner Child #1: Roses at Sunset.  I have no idea if there will be a #2 or #3. We’ll have to see what the kid has to say.