When one is raised in a household that supports the arts as much as the arts supports them, one begins to feel like a snob.
When someone would talk to me about art and say, “Well, I do have a Thomas Kinkade collector’s plate,” I couldn’t help but smirk a little bit. “You call that art?” I would ask brazenly (in my mind).
I was raised by artists.
Yes, I’d scoff. I’d talk about craft art (the dreaded art for profit that you see at Christmas bazaars and in poster shops) and real Art, with a capital A. The latter form is done for the pure love of communication through artistic expression. To strive toward a truly artistic life, however, is often a long and grinding road that challenges the artist, as well as his or her family. And if an artist is as consistent as my father, he or she all but destroy their offspring's chance of ever having a normal life. The children of artists often doomed to become artist themselves.
And so while going to school for humanities, I began working on my father’s website. My father emailed me some photos of recent paintings. I didn’t have any of the titles for the pieces, so I had to call Dad to ask him which title went with which painting.
“So, we have the medium-sized piece, warm tone. The foreground has a moss-covered boulder. The path drawing the eye in leads to a cluster of birches with autumnal leaves. There's a snow-topped mountain range in the background.”
“Does the range have a bunch of mountains?”
“Yeah, but one big one on the right.”
“That one’s called Klehani River Study,” he told me.
“Okay, now what about the one where it looks like a tide is leaving the beach...”
The conversation continued. I communicated each painting, and he offered its title. Tangents were taken. We began discussing the qualities of Ceylon green, the UW basketball team, documentaries, etc.
We then returned to discussing his work, whom I regard as an older sibling, and how it’s aged. It’s grown from broad and bold abstract to jagged pointillism, from the smoggy subdued yellows and grays to the purely saturated brilliance of his work today--the breathtaking spans of the Alaskan landscape. Many of the new paintings were done in far away in places I have never seen before. They all have titles.
My favorite paintings, however, do not.
I told dad about my favorite painting that I had swiped it from storage five years back and have since kept on a prominent wall in my bedroom. “Which one was it?” he asked.
I told him it was the orchard, looking uplake from underneath the walnut tree. “Oh, yeah,” Dad said, recollecting the memory.
Painting # 8523. His name and “1985” written in burnt umber on the lower left-hand corner are the only traces of place and time. For anyone else, it’s just a painting of no particular significance.
But this painting isn’t just a slab of art. It isn’t even Art with a capital A. For me, it’s a memory. The rows of apple trees, leading down toward the lake that seems to recline between a mountain range and desert hill.
I played in the apple orchards. We ate apples and made forts in the stacks of apple bins. We picked the winter bananas and climbed the trees. It was a place to sled in the winter. When we got older it was a place to drink beer and wax philosophy and kiss boys. They were the shortcut to school, friends’ houses, and solitude. Those trees and the view that I experienced for so long are gone now. I miss them. Now sterile lines of grapes stand, shoulder to shoulder: The knobbly apple trees were torn out after I graduated and moved on.
Now I go back and wonder if any of my past actually happened. The terrain has changed, the people have changed, my memories linger like ghosts on foreign ground.
But I have the painting that reasserts my existence. The painting says yes, I grew and aged there, because I know the emotions that built that moment. Now after the bulldozers and ghosts are gone, “The Orchard” is still fresh in my mind thanks to oil, canvas, and the unrelenting patience my father offers his art.
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