Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Painting

My parents bought a painting off a struggling artist. He would like to take up art as a full time career but circumstances forbid. He has a family to support-wife, child, ailing parents and so he is forced to give art tuition to uninterested brats. For a regular income. His creativity, he rues is getting cramped and perhaps slowly destroyed…
The painting now hangs on our living room wall. It is an eyesore. The canvas, painted a lurid red shows a despairing woman. Her arm looks like a leg of ham and a couple of sickly yellow flowers are sprouting on her head. It symbolizes the life giving power of a woman, he had explained. A moon has also been painted on the red canvas, for aesthetic reasons I believe, there being no other.
In spite of all this, one could have been stirred by some indefinable quality in his work. One is not. He could easily have been gifted, wouldn’t have done anyone any harm. But that he most definitely isn’t.
Whoever is scripting our lives can’t be counted on for kindness.

4 comments:

Shalmi said...

so the would-be tragic and talented hero becomes yet another painful specimen of the kind of life that exists on the planet...

how come some terrible paintings are really truly terrible and some others sell at starmark in south city for inordinate amounts of cash? or is something wrong with my eye...

joey said...

maybe the owner is a closet painter.like he ought to have remained.
besides,do they really sell.ive been seeing the same ones for some time now.
also,starmark stocks bullshit,invites shobha de for talks so the paintings suit.

topshe said...

Crap sells. Your painter fellow may sell something you find distasteful for a million dollars next year.

Shalmi said...

now i am wiser. artists have no idea what they're really painting.