Twisted Sisters: Part 2

(To read Part 1, click here.)

My sisters and I used to watch Bob Ross’s program, The Joy of Painting, back before we had cable.  We’d sit cross-legged in the living room in front of our big, brown, boxy television set, marveling out loud to one another about the way he painted so effortlessly.  Danni was so inspired by his talent, in fact, that she bought her own Bob Ross paint set when she was in high school.  She’d arrange her paint tubes and brushes on the table in our basement and create works of art along with the happy hippie with the sound of our clothes dryer roaring in the background.  She’d give her finished works away as Christmas gifts to the adults in our family who weren’t always easy to shop for, like the great aunts and uncles.

It was fun to see one of them on display atop the wood paneling in her hallway as I dragged my bags into her guest room on the night of my arrival.  It was of a rickety-looking shack with a snow-covered roof in the middle of a bitter cold backcountry.  She’d colored the setting sun with thick, barely-blended bands of red, yellow, and blue.  It certainly wasn’t representative of any sunset I’d ever seen, but I thought its unconventional quality gave the picture a lot of character.  And I thought the picture gave her home character.

It always impresses me when anyone chooses to adorn their walls with their own artwork.  Though I’ve long identified myself as the “artsy-craftsy” type and have even made a variety of personalized wall hangings for my loved ones in recent years, I’ve struggled with displaying my art pieces in my own home.  My college dorm room was one thing—a welcoming atmosphere for free-spirited experimentation and spontaneous splashes of color—but my home—that’s been another story. The only piece of self-constructed craftsmanship I currently have hanging in my two-bedroom apartment is a button-bordered collage in Alice’s room that contains quotes and black-and-white illustrations from Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, and it’s been strategically placed on the part of her wall that’s half-the-time hidden by her open door.  The other collaged canvas I’ve kept is just a few feet away—its colorful, crisscrossing, magazine clippings kissing the wall inside her closet.    

While I was home, I had the opportunity to pick up some of the pieces I’d completed in the painting class Danni and I had taken together my first year of college.  Seeing some of Danni’s renditions from our past projects hanging throughout her house had made me think it might be nice to do the same in my own home—to get over the picky perfectionism that’s confined my only canvases to a closet and a conspicuous corner in a kid’s room.  So when Danni announced that she wanted to stop by our house on Second Street to pick a few things up—Deion’s old activity saucer and some Baby Einstein videos for her new little guy—I jumped on the opportunity.

I suppose I should mention that my mom no longer lives in that old white house across from the paper mill.  Things changed quite a bit in the years after my sisters and I all left for college.  My mom and Terry divorced in 2005 and five years later, Mom remarried Kerry, a gruff, tough, hard-working huntsman and sentimental social butterfly.  She now lives with Kerry in his house in the center of town along with Deion and Kerry’s two teenaged daughters, Casey and Kerry Ann.  My former step-dad, Terry, who’d been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis while he and my mom were still dating, passed away last summer due to complications that arose from his disease and years of heavy smoking.

One of Kerry’s friends has been renting Mom’s house while it’s been on the market, so Danni and I headed over there in the middle of the day while the renter was at work and his kids were at school.  The house is still fully furnished with Mom’s homey, earth-toned touches and all of the scattered bits and pieces left by us kids—both those from recent years and those from long ago—so it was strange to step in and see so many things unchanged when so many things in our lives had changed. 

I felt like we were scavenging as we moved from room to room, picking things up and putting them down.  It was in the basement that Danni was disappointed to find that the Baby Einstein movies were VHS tapes and not DVDs and where I had to pass up the pile of Polly Pockets I knew weren’t practical to scoop up and take home with me at the moment.  I was tempted to rifle through the long lines of women’s clothing hanging down from the ceiling—a set-up one of my childhood friends had aptly nicknamed “The Shopping Mall”— but I held back when I realized that all of the clothes were probably either too small for me or out of style.   

Upstairs, I walked across the echoing, completely-cleared-of-clutter, hardwood floor to take a peek inside the notorious Locked Closet.  Instead of having a tower of toys come crashing down on me, I was surprised to find that the closet was relatively clean.  It was still a little cold and creepy, but the purple and orange paint Dexi had applied to the walls as a compromise when Mom and Terry wouldn’t let her paint her bedroom gave it more of a friendly feel.  I saw old board games, like Shark Attack and 13 Dead End Drive that I wanted to snatch up and take home with me, but again, I refrained. 

In the living room, I tried to snap a picture of Alice in front of the fireplace with my phone, since that was the place Mom had always had my sisters and I line up for photos in the past, but all of the shots turned out blurry because, like time, Alice kept moving so quickly. 

It was in the garage that I found the first item I knew for sure I wanted to keep—an old, orange, toddler sled with a long, wooden handle attached for pulling.  Mom and Dad had bought it when Lindsi was a baby, and had used it for all of us girls afterwards.  It was one of the few items leftover from those early days of our lives and I knew I could still use it for Alice, so I grabbed it off the wall even though I knew my van would already be overloaded on the trip back to Wyoming. 

When Danni came back down the wobbly ladder from her turn scouring the attic, she was carrying one of my old Cabbage Patch dolls.  Of course the doll was naked, with half of her yarny, red hair hacked off, but I didn’t care.  I thought it would be special for Alice to be able to play with it, so I set it on top of the sled. 

And then it was my turn to ascend into the ceiling.  Danni had yelled down to me that she’d seen my paintings while she’d been up there, so I handed Alice over to my big sister and eagerly made my way up. 

And right away, there they were, stacked neatly and leaning against a support beam at the top of the ladder, waiting patiently for our reunion. 

As I began to flip through the thick collection of canvases, I was surprised to find that they were all still in excellent condition, without any of the water damage or scuffs and scrapes I’d expected to find.  As my eyes moved over each clean, perfectly-preserved piece, rather than feeling  the appreciation, acceptance, and even affection I’d imagined I’d feel for my precious paintings, I was instead overcome by a mounting awareness that I did not want any of them hanging in my home. 

“Maybe I could let them hang around my home,” I thought for a second of the orphaned articles, but then I remembered that I lived in an apartment with limited storage space.

They simply weren’t that good.  As I reached the last painted rectangle in the stack, I remembered my renderings for what they had been all along—beginning level depictions of angles, subjects, and scenery that I hadn’t cared an ounce about.  I’d had no personal connection to the corner of my classroom’s ceiling that had been lined with silver studio lights, to a faceless mannequin torso that had been wrapped in a sheer blue shawl and ornamented with a goldenrod helmet (though I’d thought it was funny), or to the photo of some nameless horses in a frosty field that I’d attempted to duplicate.  Even the black-and-white still life that my instructor had praised as being “painterly” (whatever that had meant) disappointed me. 

I crinkled my nose as I propped the canvases up against the beam and headed back down the ladder.

“You’re not taking any of the paintings?” Bob Ross’s biggest fan asked, surprised.

“No,” I answered.  “I don’t really have the room for them right now.  Plus, they’re not as good as I remembered them to be.” 

Danni pointed out how everyone in the classroom had loved my horse picture and how our instructor had really seemed to like my painting style, but neither of her flattering reminders swayed me because I knew I wasn’t impressed with them.

It was funny to me how one person could value something while another could just as easily dismiss it.  It was like the moral of that cartoon episode my sisters and I used to watch—“one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” 

I found that concept demonstrating itself over and over again throughout my half-a-month stay in International Falls...

To be continued in the next posting…