The Subject of a Painting

by Tom Peters

8/28/2021

It hung in the living room meant for visitors. If the oldest son paints a large, soulless rendition of a sunset, a palm tree and a grass hut flanked by mountains and a gaudy orange sky; the parents proudly display the painting regardless of its quality.

The oldest son was proud as well, but it should be noted that he had yet to be exposed to the ‘masters’. After his first trip to the Detroit Institute of Arts, he would not paint again for thirty years.

In those paint-less years, photography caught his ‘eye’ and he studied the ‘masters’ of this artistic field. He purchased a camera, a tripod, some lighting equipment and eventually, everything needed for a darkroom. The ‘job’ of making money in photography bored the father of three.

The ‘masters’ he admired photographed special moments in time, caught without poses and often without people even present. The genre was called ‘street photography’ and although the father of three thought he was good at it; he sold an average of one out of every hundred he displayed at art fairs and local shows and competitions. The peak of his experience in those thirty years was an honorable mention at the Michigan Photography Exhibition.

It took a small snapshot of his third wife to finally coax him to paint, well sort of paint. The slightly creased, black and white was taken the same year the twice-divorce father of four was fighting in Vietnam. A small five-year-old in the photo is wearing rain gear, holding an umbrella on a rain slick sidewalk in the Bronx with a large yellow school bus entering the left side of the image.

It was the pure love of the snapshot of his third wife’s first day of kindergarten. A tiny, innocent child, an ominous speeding yellow school bus during a rainstorm in a big city. He knew what juxtaposition was and how photographers used it to help tell a story and emphasize differences or similarities between objects and people. Yet this was a simple snapshot to memorialize a little girl’s first day at school taken by a loving parent.

Lacking confidence in his painting skills, the photographer scanned and enlarged the photo, colorized it, and cut out the little girl and the bus. On a 16 inch by 20 inch canvas using only black and white acrylic paint, he painted a September gray sky and the wet pavement with abstract reflections on the street and sidewalk. Once the cutouts of the bus and little girl were pasted in place, he painted around the edges to help the images blend in.

This soulful rendition of a child’s first day of school hangs proudly in his living room meant for visitors.