Real Art

I spent most of my childhood in Jamestown, NY, and lately I’ve been thinking about one of the houses where I lived, a middling two-story on the northside. The place had its peculiarities, like the dining room’s upright piano, ramshackle and olive green, the psychedelic pinks and blues pervading my sister’s bedroom, and, off the master, the miniscule office. An enormous Ben Franklin woodstove squatted in the basement. The basement also included a bedroom—mine, a finished box surrounded by unfinished gloom: cold concrete, naked ceiling joists, small windows harboring spiders, egg sacs, and grime. I liked my room in the daytime. At night, I very much didn’t. My siblings slept upstairs. Off my little brother’s bedroom was a balcony without a railing. On a wall in his bedroom hung a painting.

This painting, like so much in that house, was disquieting. It featured an old barn, stone fence, and backdrop of hills, elements that conceivably could have come together whimsically but evoked no such sweetness. The artist (whoever that person was) hadn’t set out to capture country charm. No cows, pigs, sheep, or horses capered across the canvas. The barn doors were shut tight. If there were animals, they were confined to their stalls. The message was stern: Farm animals don’t get to frolic all day. Graze, yes. Sleep, of course. But they also labor and serve purposes. Sometimes terrible purposes.

The landscape’s lighting was equally dour, the scene sunless, devoid of fluffy clouds, just the gray sky and everything below it steeped in murk. Since this was a landscape, I could hardly expect the inclusion of people, but the painting begrudged even the suggestion of humanity. It could have used a tuft of black-eyed Susans or a lilac bush in bloom, something, say, the farmwife planted “to brighten things up,” or a mound of tiger lilies, the ubiquitous orange darlings that flourish by barns across the Northeast. This painting refused to tolerate frippery. The farmhouse was also absent. If the hills harbored a schoolhouse, winding roads, a market, or cabins, the painting didn’t permit any sign of them, not even a wafting chimney smoke. It was an unfriendly depiction of rural life.

Nevertheless, the painting captivated me—the first time a painting did so. I gazed at that landscape regularly and at length. Stay with a work of art long enough, and you’ll unlock some aspect of it. And it will unlock some aspect of you. I believe that now. Back then, I didn’t have an agenda. I was just a curious kid. Besides, this was the eighties, a pre-cellphones era. What else did I have to do?

I wonder if the painting reminded me of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the rural area where I was born and lived for a few years before we moved to Jamestown. I spent the rest of my childhood longing for the country. Maybe the painting, in its gravity, spoke to that ache. Humans were missing. I was missing. I’d been taken away from my bucolic beginnings, and here was a landscape that confirmed my loss.

Or maybe the painting simply surprised me. Unlike the children’s tales I’d read, cheerful books rife with engaging illustrations of rurality, this landscape didn’t aim to comfort, tickle, or please. If anything, it rebuffed me. What an odd thing, to look at a painting that seemed to say, “Stop looking at me.” Did I take the rejection as a challenge, the misanthropy as evidence of vulnerability and fear? Maybe it raised my hackles and culled a small thrill of defiance.

Many questions plague me about this landscape and that time in my life. Why in the world would my parents stick such a sourpuss of a painting in my little brother’s bedroom? For that matter, why did they stick me in the basement? What happened to this painting? Was it lost or discarded when we packed up and moved again? Did we forget to bring it with us? Was it still hanging in that house, confounding a different child?

Was I confounded? Maybe I wasn’t. Possibly, the opposite. The painting might have drawn me because it was candid. It didn’t condescend. It was life, my tween life, everyone’s life: beautiful and horrible, at once. That, I undoubtedly recognized. That, I must have sensed, was truth. In my small world, in the larger world, woe trailed beauty as surely as a shadow.