Red

The curator prepares my crate for departure. It was not supposed to be this way. My long-term exhibition cut short by the damn kid in white. I think you would feel the same way if you knew my story.

For years, I sat above the mantle in a stuffy newly decorated poorly done vintage-vibe den in a benefactor of a benefactor’s home. He had me outlined in mahogany to emphasize my red dress. I am not sure if my creator was trying to highlight my wearables, but this so-called art affinando chose my red dress as the element he cared to focus on. This owner liked me enough to look at me once or twice a week with real interest, but otherwise ignored me and paid more attention to his Rembrandt or the talking parrot both of which paralleled his random taste.

When a premier art institute contacted him about borrowing me for their shades of red exhibit, he jumped at the chance. I would like to think my layered paint encouraged his eyes to move in a way that made him look at me from multiple angles. I doubt he cared about me that much, but to have his name on a bronze plaque that read “From the Collection of” lifted his acquisitional conquests and ego to new levels of importance.

Opening night of what I would call the crème de la crème of red interpretations unfurled as a clash between romanticism and bloodshed. It was a feast for the eyes laid out in one narrow and long passageway that gave my pane the attention and intimacy my creator envisioned and I deserved. All eyes were on me during the day which was exhilarating and exhausting. With rarely a notice in my permanent residence and no stimulating company, the Rembrandt dull, dry and the parrot who crapped everywhere, I had no interest or motivation to temporarily peel myself off my canvas to explore. But here, I felt awakened like my brushstrokes were new and not over a hundred years old.

In this public space, the temptation to see what lay beyond temporary exhibit spot 141 was tantalizing. For the first few nights, after the sun was long set and the security guards pacing moved to sitting near the entrance, I watched Horned Frog at Sunset and Boy with Blue Cap in Poppies Variation No. 2 meet mid-exhibit to join the parade that left our space for points unknown.

It took energy to disembark your creative homeland. Energy until now I had not really wanted to summon. The first night I had to shed the fear that my creator would be disappointed I was leaving his masterpiece. Once I got past that hurdle, I ran with the other reds even though none of the other escapees were actually red. I laughed at the irony that I as a Flamenco dancer in a ruffled red dress came from the only painting where the main subject was cloaked in red. A powerful revelation.

I developed a nightly routine seeking excitement with other mattes and watercolors.

I liked the vibe in the modern wing. I would spend time there lamenting with a square why his dimensions were eight by eight and not ten by ten. The glass balloon art figurines put on a nightly circus until one of them accidentally ran into a water fountain and shattered. Oops! After this unfortunate event, the wing lost its attractiveness since they followed a strict relegation period of punishment in their own display spots after any art/man encounter.

It was from their terrible tragedy that I found myself in the Impressionist’s wing. There was something contemplative about the artists who captured everyday life in variations that mirrored and opposed my painted environment. Yes, I was a sultry seductive and from the underground of cities and they from backdrops of picturesque landscapes and innocent inoculations of scene. But their essentiality of life danced well with my brashness.

I grew close with the spirit of a farmer from one of the haystack paintings. (You have to know. I adored his creator’s use of shading to hint at, but never show the man.) The spirit farmer even invited me to his canvas for a platonic admiration of the use of smears and blending. 

I stared at bowls of fruit on other works until one of the secondary subjects shared an apple with me. I had never sampled food let alone an artist’s inspired food which I imagined was far greater than anything a human could grow. It’s texture crunching like dried up paint. I nearly wet myself with its juiciness that flowed after the second bite. 

Knowing I needed my pristine condition for survival, I learned to carefully gnaw away from my stacked acrylic silhouette. And while the texture and byproducts were real, I unfortunately did not have tastebuds or a digestive system so my discard laid in piles at the bases of the pictures.

“Happens all the time,” the spirt farmer assured me. My pile no larger than an assemblance of dust mites could easily be cleaned up by the overnight janitorial crew who might believe they missed it during their nightly broom maneuvers. We knew they slacked on the job and so did they. My secret would be safe with them.

The fruit bowl and haystack communities welcomed me like I had never been welcomed over the mantle. I went there night after night to indulge in conversational acrobatics while eventually returning to my temporary residence. I mastered my reframe timing to exactly three minutes before the overnight guards made their final rounds nearing sunrise. I had a dual-purpose existence and I liked it. An existence I hoped my creator would have wanted for me too.

My ritual continued until she showed up one night. I think you know her. She came from the pointillism works. The pieces where the artists must have been unskilled at many of the brushstrokes my creator mastered. Dots, dots and more dots. Except in this one painting where a little girl in a white dress faces the crowd head-on covered with solid swipes of the paintbrush. I had rarely even looked at her as I ran to my nightly reunions even though I understood she was quite famous. The points mostly stayed to themselves. They hated their transparency.

I am not sure if she had ever left her grand space before, but that night she stood back turned towards her contingent simply staring hard at me. In my defense, her creator had intentionally blurred her face so I almost did not notice her gaze. Her innocence swept up in her summery sundress and hat accessory. I would not have paid her much attention that night either but the points had turned away from their stutterings to look at her looking at me.

“Go back with the temporaries or else,” she warned in a stern voice not that of a young child hanging out in a painting with a mom at her side.

I ignored her warning and carried out my nightly escape even though I could not shake the creepiness of a bunch of dots staring at me with a little girl, their spokesperson, threatening me in a way I might have received in a macabre Halloween exhibit at a side street exhibition. Not at an elite museum with trained curators. Surely every painting was welcomed for its contributions to the artscape.

I had plenty of time to lament on these thoughts over the next two evenings because the halls never emptied. They instead rattled with the screams and shrieks of girls dressed in browns and greens running through the gallery. I was plastered in place because of this thing an old guitar player I met, who seemed to understand the underbelly of the art of human life, had called a “lock-in.” Whatever it was, the uneducated and uncouth youngsters found it amusing to mimic the works they paused long enough to look at. When they got to me, they pretended to inflate their chests and made gestures with their fingers that I imagined referenced some type of sexual act. Crude and uninformed.  I tried not change my creator’s intention by invoking a smirk.

The more I was shut in the more I craved the elusive kumquat in the golden goblet of Still Life at Montego Bay. I had asked around about how to get fruit out of a still life since its territory was off limits to any muse not created by the artist. The old guitar player, again full of knowledge, had a plan ready to enact during our next rendezvous.

Quiet and emptiness returned on the third night and I anxiously headed back to my promised land. Maybe my guard was low because I imagined I had tastebuds or being cooped up had me longing for freedom again, but I missed seeing her. I missed the girl in the white dress as I stepped into her territory in search of my delicacy.

I did not realize she was behind me until the piano player in the Parisian-style cabaret painting with a frame as big as its canvas shifted his eyes away from his keys and towards me. I saw her tiny fingers gripping something in her hand. The object did not resemble anything I remembered in her Sunday-in-the-park domain. It looked humanoid. How could she have obtained something tangible in our intangible existence?

My pondering lasted only a moment as she hurled her arm in the air and slashed the object in my direction. The thin silver rod about twice the size of her arm was far from perfect. One end looped into itself. The other forced into a jagged attempt at a straight line. Her weapon I would later find out was called a staple.

“Get out you whore,” she yelled at me presenting her object as if I wanted to get closer to examine it.

Was she judging me based on my artist’s creation of me as a bailaora, vibrant and bold in dance with frocks to match? His stroke-work capturing the essence of movement in a single frame adored by many. Through pigments and palettes, he drew motion on a motionless base. He gave me life because of me and not in worry of a critic’s review of me.

And she did not like me. Damn critic.

She charged at me and scraped the raw edge of metal against the front bustle of my dress – my calling card denominator in the art world. Red colorant stained its edge. The creations in the room stopped their evening gatherings and collectively gasped. That is all the creations except the points and her who broke out into belly-rolling laughter far beyond their diminutive existence in paintings larger than their individual contributions to them.

I looked down and saw the abrasion and knew my residency was limited. My wall space likely to be vacant because of my lack of perfectionism. With my creator long since dead, I lamented over how I could recover.

“They’ll find you a good restorer and maybe you’ll come back,” the old guitar play tried to reassure me. Needing to tap into accumulated knowing about human elements again, I had to ask.

“Where did she get that thing?”

“Whether we want it or not, humans channel us when they believe we are like them.” He pointed to the little girl who lost interest in my plight dropping the scraper to return to her own brood. “Big humans who see her want to be her.”

“A girl in a white dress?” I questioned angrily.

“A child,” he paused surveying the paintings around him. “And by them becoming her, she begins to become them.”

“Is this a good thing?” My question more rhetorical than I thought answerable, but the omniscient responded.

“If we all could redeem lost souls and wanderers like she does, all art would be enough.” He sighed and retreated to his oil masterpiece.

Which leads me to my precarious situation today. The crate and packing materials being readied to ship me off somewhere so my red can be restored to my creator’s imagined pantone. Will it ever be as my creator intended? Are we ever as good as we are before a tarnish? I bet you will agree with me the answer is no.

I hang ready to be unhinged.