A Painting Through Time

The man stands in front of the painting, a faint smile tugging on his lips. It’s positioned in the centre of the gallery, the main attraction, the masterpiece. His masterpiece. Well, he didn’t make it. But he found it. He recognised its eternal beauty, older than anyone who would ever see it but somehow still as young as when it was first made. A happy accident, many would call it, if they ever knew its true backstory. How it came to be hanging in the middle of the gallery in the twenty-first century. But of course, no one could ever know. To the curator, it’s incredible, every stroke and pigmented mark on the canvas weaving a tale that no one can see, a life that no one has lived. Each mark on the page tells a story that’s long in the past, forgotten in time.

But to the world, it’s a mishmash of colour, seemingly randomly plastered across the canvas.

Three years ago, the curator had made a mistake. A machine promising safe passage through the pages of time –gone wrong. His best friend, at the time, yelling, ‘Run!’ and the curator scrambled to pick up whatever was closest to him –the canvas. The curator had survived the accident with the clothes on his back. His friend? Gone. The canvas? Whisked away to a land long forgotten.

Dust billowed into the air as the canvas landed beside the road. The clicking of horses’ hooves and angry yells of men on their backs passing the blank canvas on the road. The whipping of reins. Then, a stomp. A bloody U-shape mark seeping into the fabric that had been criss-crossed across the wooden frame, the mark of the horse that didn’t know the mark it had left on the future.

The canvas lay on the road as rain beat down on it, in a time before cars and warm houses and electricity that illuminated the streets at night. The horse’s bloody hoof print had turned a mottled maroon but still darkened the middle of the canvas. Streaks of water rotted its wooden framed and wind knocked it against trees and houses. It saw the sun on thirty-degree days when leaves landed on it, leaving faint outlines that traced around the hoof-print. It saw cold, winter nights when snowflakes melted into the fabric of its being –the woven strands that were strung together across the wooden frame. It saw smoke and it saw fire –stained by falling ash and debris, clouding but never consuming the hoofprint as years drifted by.

The canvas saw the colourful staining from tie-dye shirts when a woman didn’t want to stain her expensive countertop so she used it as a backing –vibrant reds, greens and yellows seeping into the material, a marker of the changing times, as cars flew down the streets and fires were replaced with electricity and clothing was made for practicality and cranked out faster and faster each day, to be left in wet piles in the corners of the streets. Where the canvas was ultimately left, stained and wet, where nobody bothered to look. Where old toys were forgotten and stray cats slunk through ripped-open garbage bags, scrounging for scraps that people now had the money to have, to waste, to throw away things that used to be treasured.

It lay there until hopeful parents dug through the rubbish, looking for abandoned toys or dummies for their child, struggling to keep themselves afloat through busy schedules and Zoom meetings where he would be crying in the background, warding off potential clients. The canvas was picked up and dumped in front of the child with a few coloured paints to keep him occupied for the forty-five-minute meeting, and he pressed his hand in the colours then across the canvas. Over the faded stains before it, the child’s handprints marked the new era, the time of devices in front of faces and attention spans shorter than ten seconds and iPad kids screaming when their precious videos were shut off for the night –but this boy was content with just his canvas and some colours, making his mark on the future and the past.

A child who is now long dead’s handprints lived on as the canvas was wedged into the garbage but the rotting frame granted it flight in the wind, and it drifted between towns and cities until the curator stumbled upon it again, barely a week after the unfortunate accident in the time-machine, drifting along the streets like an old, used paper bag, abandoned on the roadside with a patchwork of colours and stains telling a story through the ages of time.

The curator knew it was the same canvas. He picked it up, seeing the handprints, the tie-dye stains, the faint outlines of leaves and the darkened colours of snowflakes. He saw the bloody hoof-print that started it all, now a faded, darkened colour beneath the layers of time.

He framed it in glass and sold it to a museum. Once, disregarded, now, relished.

The canvas had been licked by every moment in history –every significant event, the canvas had been there, being marked by natural forces until finally it returned to the present.

So, the curator looks at it and smiles. Because this painting isn’t like the rest of them –no, it took over a hundred years and a time machine to create, the rotting wood and the seemingly random colours marking a point in history that the curator never saw; the modern structure taking a passage through time to where it didn’t belong, but the colours telling a tale of where it had been.

Passersby walk around the artwork after a fleeting glance, or a muttered, ‘that’s cool,’ but it’s only the curator who recognises its eternal beauty. The type of beauty that would outlast anyone who ever entered the gallery, whoever laid eyes on the artwork, anyone who saw the child’s handprints or the tie-dye stains or even the hoofprint that started it all.

It was a painting through time.