Corinna Clendenen - An Artful Affair

Corinna Clendenen

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Inspirations

Inspiration for Bo’s painting

If I had to name a painter whose work most resembles Bo’s, it would be Jamie Wyeth. His particular combination of the odd, the fantastic, and the surreal, rendered through dazzling realism, is similar in both spirit and style to Bo’s paintings.

Images of Jamie Wyeth’s paintings:

Meteor Shower
Lighthouse
Automaton
Pumpkinhead
Orca
Other Voices

Inspiration for the story

     Writers are often asked where they get their ideas, and sometimes they don’t know. But in the case of An Artful Affair, I remember its origin clearly. It was in New York at the Museum of Modern Art, which I had visited with a struggling artist I knew. Afterwards I wrote the essay below that conveys the experience.

A Small Fish Tale

     My cousin Nathan is an artist. He paints remarkable paintings unlike any I have ever seen. For twenty years he has lived in an unheated loft above a fish market in Hoboken, New Jersey. The rent is cheap and he says the big northern windows provide excellent lighting for applying paint to canvas. He pays his landlord with the money he makes working the night shift at the tollbooth on the George Washington Bridge.
     Nathan makes a mean bouillabaisse. He is also an expert at timing. Towards the end of the day the garbage dumpster behind the fish market fills up with fish heads and bones left over from preparing fillets. Nathan keeps an eye on the clock and at 4:30 sharp dons his old canvas coat and shows up at the back of the fish market. He needs to get there after the garbage has been put out and the fishmongers are cleaning up inside, and before they secure the top of the garbage dumpster to keep out the water rats. Nathan doesn’t carry any kind of container because he doesn’t want to get caught. His coat has lots of pockets.
     The neighborhood cats compete with Nathan for the bones with the most meat left on them. Nathan is allergic to cats, so the last time I showed up for dinner I found him wheezing and sniffling as he stood over his old gas stove, inhaling the vapors from the savory soup in an attempt to clear his nasal passages.
     Nathan shows his huge paintings that include all sorts of unusual animals like armadillos and snow leopards at a co-op gallery in the East Village. He’s never landed a regular commercial gallery. The directors don’t seem to think his paintings will sell. Since his paintings include so much animal imagery, he once sent his slides to the National Wildlife Refuge Association, but they didn’t bite. Nathan jokes that he wishes his timing were as good with the art market as it is with the fish market.
     Recently Nathan and I went to the Museum of Modern Art. He said he felt a need to see the work of some of his influences, notably Van Gogh. We were there all afternoon because it was hard to get Nathan to move on from any of the paintings. He stood in front of Starry Night for at least 15 minutes, pointing out to me how thickly the impasto was laid on, reveling in the purity of the pigment, until a guard came over and asked him to please keep his fingers away from the painting.
     While we were standing there, two well-dressed women came up behind us. Their hair was primped and puffed just so, their diamond earrings glinted like shards of ice. Nathan was wearing his usual canvas coat with all the pockets. It smelled a little like fish. His hands were buried in the pockets, venting the flaps, but his face was about six inches from the canvas.
     The museum was fairly crowed on this weekend afternoon and the two women clearly expected to benefit from the position they had gained. They wanted to see the painting and they wanted to see it now. They jockeyed around the periphery of my cousin, edging for a better view, when suddenly Nathan stepped to one side and accidentally trod on one of the women’s toes.    She gasped and glared at him. Her friend exclaimed, “Goodness!” and flared her nostrils disdainfully as Nathan turned around. He looked startled, murmured an apology, and moved away. The first woman turned to her friend and commented, “Really. The people who are admitted to museums these days.” They moved into position and began oohing and ahhing over the Van Gogh.
     I know enough about art history to know that Van Gogh, like Nathan, never sold a painting in his life. He sometimes couldn’t afford to buy canvas. Hard times and the lack of patronage drove him mad—he finally cut off his ear and was committed to a mental institution. When he got out, he eventually took his own life. Van Gogh’s genius required the historical perspective so often necessary for brilliant artists to achieve general recognition.
     Now, a hundred years later, Van Gogh’s paintings bring some of the highest prices in the art market. They sell for multi-millions of dollars. Art lovers view his work in droves. And were Van Gogh to stand beside them, he might very well tread on their feet.
     Since our trip, Nathan has started a new series. It features cats. Their imagery is odd—they often have more than one tail and elongated whiskers. In one canvas, a cat frolics with dancing fish skeletons in a bowl of multi-dimensional soup, droplets of creamy broth flying off its whiskers.
     My cousin is a talented and dedicated painter. I believe that whether his paintings sell or not, he deserves to be treated with the respect afforded any committed professional. He may not be Van Gogh, but then again, given different timing–another hundred years or so–who knows? There may be an inexplicable hint of fish in the Museum of Modern Art.