It was a simple little painting, nice if nothing especially original or fantastically crafted or anything startling like that, but I liked what I saw. It was of a slightly stylized, funny little semi-abstract bird, one of those paintings that always run the risk of being too cute and cuddly and charming for its own good, with a few little bitty splashes of the leftover paint sprinkled about the canvas almost as an afterthought, maybe meant to evoke flowers or stars. Not much to move me or even catch my attention . . . except . . .
No, this is not the painting. Not even part of it. I couldn't photograph someone else's artwork (this is mine, as always) and stick it in my blog even if I wanted to do so, because that would be (a) copyright infringement and (b) as ill-mannered as flying over someone and . . . well, you'll see . . .
I liked what I saw because that last little splash, those sprinkly spots–why, they landed smack in the empty space right beneath the birdie’s tail. All of a sudden a foofy little bird that seemed to have been meant to act all pert and prim . . . had pooped. In an eyeblink it went straight from being a prissy little pretty-bird vacant of all meaning to become a faintly twerpish chirper, a vaguely immature and irresponsible and a much, oh ever so much, more real and kindred-spirit creature. “I strafe upon you all!” it cheeped, but all the while with the same blandly friendly expression, almost as if it were a passive-aggressive scalawag of a bird just barely behind that pastel-feathered façade.
So much more understandable and filled with story-time potential, this impertinent little fellow. It’s not that I want to be that bronze-cast personage of the park whereon the pigeons land to ‘take their ease’–life offers plenty of opportunities for humans to feel they’re treated like inanimate objects or public restrooms as it is–it’s just that part of me is pleased that a little cutesy-bird was allowed to go his own way just for the element of surprise, that some painter I might’ve dismissed as boringly sugared-up with too-sweet birds decided, literally, to ‘let this one go’.
Even better to my mind, I’m afraid, is if that same artist never even noticed the obvious implication of that splotch’s placement and so sent out, for show and sale, a scamp of a bird that flicked its tail with devious disdain and dropped its pretty pastel bombs upon the painter’s cozy dainty reputation right along with all the passing world. I couldn’t help myself: I liked what I saw.
No, obviously this is not the painting in question either. In the interest of full disclosure, however, I will tell you that my original mixed media painting shown digitally here was titled ‘Ruach‘, a nice juicy Hebrew name meant to evoke the eponymous Holy Spirit. Which, being represented in the narratives generally by a much nicer (if not necessarily politer) sort of bird, would presumably drop kindlier sorts of things upon one in passing. I would hope. And hey, that just makes the earthly, earthy mischievousness of the bird in the other painting that much more amusingly charming by contrast. If you share my childish kind of humor, anyway.
Art-Colored Glasses 