ON THE SQUARE: Art for Sale

By Dustin Graham

The Greenwood Chamber is starting an arts festival that will run along the walking trail this May. It should make for a busy day here in Greenwood with the farmer’s market and the annual Airing of the Quilts happening on the same day as the Artfest. My parents put me in an art class when I was in the third grade. They mistook passion for talent. I enjoyed art and made lots of sketches and wrote stories. I recall asking my step father to make copies of my story at his work. His response was that he was not my publisher, well now I have a real publisher.

My mother would drive me to Fort Smith once a week to go to an oil painting class in a musty old house. My teacher, Judy, was a character. She had a deep raspy voice from decades of chain smoking and yelling at little kids who could not paint. She had a demeanor akin to John Wayne. Judy had two chihuahuas and her mother lived in the next room in a hospital bed which was sad and kind of unsettling to me at that age. Judy always seemed to be in some sort of legal dispute with her neighbors. She told me once that her neighbor had called her “a female dog” which she is not so she was suing him for slander.

I was terrible with oil paints. I would paint for 15-20 minutes and then Judy would come and fix all of my mistake. By the time she was done I could hardly recognize my own painting. To this day I have no emotional connection to the paintings. They sit in storage and in my mother’s house collecting dust. I did a painting of Krusty the Clown a couple of years ago which was also terrible but no one fixed it for me and I love it. To my wife’s dismay it hangs on our wall to this day.

The most interesting thing that happened through all of this was that I was on Noon on Five a local daytime TV show. I was there with Judy because I was her youngest student. My parents almost died of embarrassment because I mentioned their name and then proudly exclaimed that my paints were for sale. I was quite the little capitalist.

Resource: http://greenwooddemocrat.com