Art, Unbidden

Look at the carved cattle trails, all converging on the dark heart of the barn. The little outbuilding I'll tell you about is the half-white one in front of the barn. The house Clarence and Opal lived in is on the left side of the road.

Any city person who moves to the country has outbuilding envy. We city folk tend to put up houses, garages, and not much else. Country folk had an outbuilding for everything. Maybe that's why their houses were so tidy and homey. They weren't trying to cram everything into them the way we do. They had outbuildings for all their crap. For instance, I dream of a potting shed, where the stacks and mounds of huge planters and tiny pots that spill all over our tractor and bicycles could find a real home.

The beauty of country outbuildings is the way they fit into the farm and the landscape. I can't bring myself to buy a pre-fab shed just to have a shed. But this little garage/shed/barn has a beauty that's hidden from the main road. The former owners of this farm were Clarence and Opal M., who I had the pleasure of getting to know just a little when I stopped to talk with them about the brilliant blue bluebird houses Clarence had constructed and put on fenceposts around the house. They were enormous, perhaps 9" square, and painted bright blue because Clarence thought that might help attract bluebirds. Of course, they were full of house sparrows. I gave Clarence a couple of little Gilbertson PVC boxes, which house sparrows don't much like, and he put those up, too. Got bluebirds in 'em! Clarence was in his nineties by the time we met. I'm so glad I stopped to talk with him that day.

Clarence and Opal are gone now, and the bluebird boxes are gone, too. But the new owner of the little farm has saved, at least for now, one thing I prayed would survive the change of hands: Clarence's art.
I'm glad I got a chance to admire this in front of Clarence, to show him my paintings in the copy of Enjoying Bluebirds More that I gave him, so he'd know I wasn't just blowing smoke when I told him I loved them. Here's a closeup of the pinto's head…
This painting has the same quality, to my eye, that Inuit art displays--an elegant reduction of unnecessary detail, a fluidity and grace. It makes me want to paint a horse on our barn. But my horse would look much more like a real horse, and in that something precious and irreproducible would be lost. I simply know too much about how to paint a horse "properly" to do a nice barn painting. How I wish I could ask Clarence to come paint a horse on our garage, because I'd much rather look at his art.

Another surprise awaited around the corner: a frieze, depicting a pair of horses and a foal, now almost lost to the elements:
The square chips of paint gave it a mosaic-like quality, and looking at these paintings I saw something ancient, as ancient as cave art: the desire to capture beauty, however well or ill-equipped the artist. Clarence surely captured something in these paintings, and through his interpretation gave them another layer of beauty.

Inside the barn, another surprise awaited: some folk art by kittens.
The cat and her kittens, like Clarence and Opal, are doubtless long dead, but I am here on this February day, rinsed clean by the traces they have left.