My mother’s favorite paintings repulsed me: a woman’s melting, eyeless face on a weeping, streaky background of dark blues and browns. A menacing silhouette of a faceless hat-man on a scarred black background. Blotchy and bruised flowers drooping across a sagging canvas. Others compelled me to endless reexamination: architectural drawings of an imaginary city, a name and class number scrawled on the back. An unframed oil painting of a stern green alien touching a weeping child’s long black hair. A balding clown, clutching what is indiscernibly a dog or a doll, both smiling in the same brainless, naive way.
The paintings I preferred were endearing. They were clumsy and sincere. Expressions in portraits were optimistic or afraid, vulnerable in a way I loathed and envied and felt unable to express myself.
When I inherited my mother’s collection, I hired an art appraiser--a short, bald British man with tiny round glasses. In his portrait, he posed against a fake bookcase background. Though I didn’t know what the letters tacked onto his name meant, his list of abbreviated accolades and titles impressed me.
I showed him stacks of paintings leaning against a dusty brick wall. He flipped through them and laughed.
“It’s all so ugly,” he said.
Worrying that worthless art reflected something about me, I carried the smiling clown and his smiling dog to the curb. I propped him at the bottom of my stoop for a stranger to take when I wasn’t looking. My neighbor and good friend, Jim, was passing by. He held the painting at arm’s length, beholding something I couldn’t see.
“This is amazing.”
Over the next four years, the clown painting was a constant in my friendship with Jim. I entered his apartment and the clown confronted me, sitting on the mantle in Jim’s kitchen. Its grotesque, misshapen head, the blank and innocent eyes of its electrocuted dog. Over time, I bonded with him. I admired how he held fast to a friend who rendered life more meaningful. I adored his optimism, his unapologetic glee.
At some point, Jim propped the painting up outside. He leaned it against the windowsill of his ground-floor apartment. Its beady eyes gazed at passersby on the sidewalk. In a neighborhood where every errant “free” object is snatched off the curb within hours, no one stole the painting for over a year.
The residue of my friendship with Jim shellacked the painting with sentimental patina. When I arrived at Jim’s apartment and beheld the clown propped against the windowsill, safe for another day, I was relieved.
When Jim moved last year, he offered me the clown painting back. I framed it in an antique wooden frame with carved scrollwork corners, and hung it above my dining room table. It keeps us company at every dinner we share.
I like the short stories 😌
Fantastic piece, loved this heaps. Thanks for sharing.