The Art Connoisseur

Last Fall, I was in Portland for a job interview and stumbled on a 1950s storefront. It had large windows that lined the short walk up to the door of the store. It intrigued me because it was an anomaly in a hip, urban neighborhood. The display windows were at least nine feet tall and inside those windows, framed artwork was hung from the top of each wall to the bottom, side to side, and then across the floor of the display shelf on the bottom of the window case. The art pieces hung touching each other like the artwork in Tzarina Catherine the Great’s summer home in St. Petersburg, Russia. It looked like 3-D wallpaper. I stood there captivated by the collection of mostly animals, but some still life paintings were on display, too. My art critic eye caused me to always buy a piece of art when traveling, even when the travel was for business as it was with this trip. Until stumbling upon this store, I had not seen any art pieces that made me want to add to my collection. I stood there a few minutes more, admiring the quality of the artwork and then decided there was a painting I liked, so I walked in. I immediately felt like an intruder: There were desks, people were working, there was no counter to approach. However, the sound of the door closing caught the attention of someone working at the back of the store. He stood up and called out.

“Can I help you?”

I said, “Yes, I am interested in buying one of the art pieces in your window. Clearly, you are exhibiting some talented artists.”

“They are not for sale,” he informed me. “They are my private collection of paint-by-number art. This is an architect’s office.” 

I was about to respond, and he added, “I, uh, like your zirconia horse pin.” 

“Oh, I am sorry,” I said to him while silently calling myself an idiot. How could I have not realized I was looking at junk and not art? Here I was, a popular social media art critic, known as a connoisseur of paintings, and couldn’t recognize paint-by-number printed canvas works from original artwork. My cheeks were red hot with humiliation. I told myself I must be tired, so I headed back to my hotel to take a nap. I was staying overnight in a hip, ultra-contemporary Portland hotel, the kind where the only way to figure out how to turn off the lights, the tv and the shower is to phone the front desk. Upon returning to the hotel, fatigue caught up to me. I fell on the bed horizontally and dialed zero on the telephone, the only thing I knew for sure how to operate.

“This is room 344, can you please tell me how to turn off the lights?”

“Of course, just press the button on the wall behind the lamp.” The desk clerk had that how-many-time-must-I-say-this tone in his voice. Yet, another moment that painted my face red. I sat up and used the remote to pull down the window shade, pressed the button on the wall, turned my back into the darkness, and closed my eyes.  Quickly, sleep, like a Hollywood director with a megaphone, yelled “Action!” A simple command that caused my dreams to roll those self-made movies of every genre, that visit me almost every night.

I went back to that architect office.[CB1]  After all it was only a block from the hotel. The storefront that time had skipped over for decades, was full of beautiful paintings, by expert hobbyists who love paint-by-number. I wanted to take a picture and post it to my Facebook page. The windows were still full of paintings in various kinds of frames. The themes of the paintings were from a different era, a detail I failed to notice when I went there earlier. I stood there captivated again by the collection. One painting I missed on my first visit, caught my attention. It was of running horses at the point where all four hoofs are off the ground. The suggestion that horses fly excites me and makes me appreciate the unexpected in nature. I looked closer and discovered that the paintings were paint by number. Together, the paintings made quite a collage, so I stepped back to take a picture with my cell phone. I wanted to capture the entire store windows in the photograph so my Facebook friends would get tricked as I had. I kept backing up and found myself standing on streetcar rails. I could hear a streetcar approaching so I snapped the photo quickly. Then I heard the streetcar horn. I turned to step off the rails, but it was too late. I felt a rush of air as the doors to the streetcar folded open. I fell inside. The car did not stop moving. I pulled myself up the three steps into the streetcar. I stood up, looking around trying to catch my breath. I said to myself, might as well ride to the end of the line. I walked to a seat and sat down. I tried to snap a photo of the store from the streetcar window, but the window glass was so opaque nothing outside the car was visible. The streetcar had this funky yellow lighting that seemed to flow from the ceiling of the car down over the passengers.

As I walked down the aisle trying to find an empty seat, I noticed every passenger had a canvas, paintbrush, and paints. A cup of water was suspended under the windows. No one made eye contact as I walked through the streetcar looking for an empty seat. As soon as I sat down, a conductor appeared and handed me a canvas, paints, and paintbrushes. He then filled the cup under my window with water. 

“You have 20 minutes before we reach the end of the line. You know what will happen if your canvas is not finished, so start painting.” he announced. 

I protested this conscription into painting, but his steel tone commanded no objections. The streetcar wheels continued to squeal as it started to slowly move along the rails. 

The streetcar conductor announced loudly, “Next stop, end of the line.” 

I looked at the brush and paints and then down at the canvas. How could we be so close to the end of the line? I hadn’t seen any carbarn or other sign of a turn around when I walked towards the architect office that I thought was an art gallery. Then I looked down at the canvas assigned to me. There was an image of horses running at the point where all four hoofs are off the ground, just like my pin. It was printed as a paint by number painting.

I wet the brush in the cup of water and looked again at the painting. Wait, it wasn’t running horses, it was running DeviantArt Hoofs pictured on deviantart.fandom.com. The bananas and hands did not have the same grace as hoofs when flying off the ground. Nevertheless, I started painting, furiously, neglecting to stay within the lines.

“What happens if we don’t finish before we get to the end of the line?” I asked out loud to no one in particular. 

No reply, just the squeal of metal against metal as the wheels of a trolley car scraped along the trolley rails that ran down the center of the street outside the shop. No one made eye contact.

My fears started to wane as I remembered I took Art 101 in undergrad., supposedly an easy A class. I thought about the assignment in that class, to paint a bowl of fruit that sat on a bar stool in the front of the class. A checkered, linen napkin was draped over the seat of the stool, under the bowl of fruit. One student upset the instructor with the comment, “What a cliché.” When I looked at the fruit though, I remembered that to me, it looked like horses. Bananas curved on top of apples and oranges. The bananas were flying over the other fruits. My drawing suggested that someone was going to put the bananas on the apples and oranges but stopped mid-air. When the art teacher looked at my painting, she said I needed to learn how to join the objects in the still life.

“The still life?” I had asked her. “Isn’t fruit, dead once it is removed from the tree it grows on? Isn’t that why we have to eat it before it rots?”

 I had asked these questions out loud then realized it was probably a really, bad mistake. I resumed drawing the dead life, trying to form the shapes and colors as best I could. When it came time for me to explain the way I painted the bananas as dancing because the peel could not alone harness the banana’s joy of dancing. No still life on my canvas, this was moving life. The teacher was not amused but the college newspaper loved my essay about the assignment and that’s when I knew my forte is critiquing art not creating art. My memory faded, replaced with the image of the blue hair of my art instructor then morphing into the canvas of running DestinArt hoof in front of me, waiting to receive paint.

What would happen if I didn’t finish it, I wondered? No one was talking. I tried to start a conversation with the man seated behind me. Bowed over the canvas, brush in his hand, the man was frozen, not even touching the canvas! I said in a cheerleader voice, “Hello!”

He never looked up. Was he hard of hearing? I said it louder, but no response. He just sat there with the brush poised above the canvas, oblivious to me and everything else around him. I then looked around to see who else was on this crazy ride. That annoying yellow light made it difficult to make out the details of the other riders. I saw a lady across the aisle. She was wearing a babushka. It was printed in a purple paisley design. Her long, pale fingers were covered in splotches of purple paint. She was painting roosters. Three finished canvases were on the seat next to her. The three rooster beaks stood out of the painting and were open as if they were about to crow cock-a-doodle-do. I strained to see through the yellow haze, apparently those roosters in the drawings had crowed and purple cock-a-doodle-dos hung in the air above their beaks.

The conductor shouted, “Last stop, end of the line.”

My stomach froze, what did it mean to get to the end of the line? I looked around again to see if I could talk to someone. I could not see the conductor because the trolley car was so long, I could not see the front of it. There was someone two seats in front of me. My mind would not identify the person as a man or a woman. Shoulder-length black hair with average-width shoulders carried no marker of gender. I rose to walk to the seat to speak to the nonbinary person and the streetcar rocked suddenly, knocking me back into my seat.

“Do not leave your seat while the car is in motion.” The voice of the conductor warned me to sit down. How could he see me in this yellow haze? I wondered.

“All artworks must be complete before the end of the line,” the conductor barked this warning twice as loud as his other announcements. I sat down but anger was started to bloom in my chest in a way that it would soon jump out in a scream[CB2] , a scream that had no sound.

An ostrich filled my peripheral vision. It was hop-skipping down the aisle of the car, headed towards the front of the trolley. Its colors were incomplete: only a few of the numbers had been painted. A white-haired man in a navy-blue cashmere, knee-length coat was running in front of it, screaming, “Stop you bloody fool!” His beard reached the coat’s first button. Beard hairs were scattered on the front of the coat. The ostrich’s beak was painted and carried navy striped trousers with the belt dangling and banging against the seats as it ran. I moved closer to the window just in time to avoid the belt smacking me in the face. I heard the conductor yell, “Take your seat!”

“Where the hell am I?” I asked as loudly as I could. The reply was the clanking of the metal wheels of the trolley screeching over the streetcar rails. I looked to see what passenger might help me understand what was happening. All were focused on the canvas they were painting. I looked at my canvas and the DestinArt hoofs were holding bananas with their hands. I screamed. No passengers moved; the conductor never appeared. Another announcement overtook my scream, “All animals must be painted by the end of the line. Next stop, end of the line.”

“Conductor, help me. Conductor, help me. This is an emergency!” I yelled.

I fell back into my seat with tears spilling all over my hands that were strangling a paint brush. My tears smeared the paint on my canvas. My cries were met with silence. The conductor never came.

“What does it mean to get to the end of the line? I can’t paint! What is going to happen to me? Why are we painting all these animals? Who are these people? Where are they going? What the f?” The profane word wouldn’t climb to my lips to fall out. I fell back into my seat gasping for breath trying to collect myself as there was no help coming.

“All artworks must be finished when we reach the end of the line. Next stop, end of the line.” The conductor repeated this threat or statement, I did not know which it was. The lock went all mushy then a small paint-by-number canvas was propped in the windowpane. It could not be moved. I sat down, dejected, and terrified.

“How much longer now until we get to the end of the line?” I asked loudly. No one answered.

The solution now seemed simple, do what everyone else was doing, be quiet and paint. I picked up a paint brush and looked again at the canvas. The paint-by-number canvas did not have a key indicating what color belonged with what number. That gave me the license to make my own numbers be any color I chose. I started to paint. My mind lost the fear and stress of being on the streetcar. I was tricked into completing a beautiful painting in the middle of a ride of terror. Then, another announcement.

“End of the line!”

The sound of the creaky wheels had stopped. The yellow light was bright yellow. I stood up from my seat to disembark from the trolley. I was relieved that the trip was over. I heard the streetcar doors fold open. I ran towards the sound of the opening door. The conductor was standing at the door.

“Paintings please,” the conductor announced.

Everyone but me had their painting in hand. I panicked I was afraid if I took time to go back to pick it up the trolley might leave before I could get off, yet the conductor clearly was not going to let me leave without a painting. I ran back and snapped up the wet painting, smearing it. As I got back to the door, the conductor said, “Straight ahead please!”

I looked down at the steps to make sure I did not trip or fall and jumped onto the street after taking the last step. I looked up and I was behind a row of stores, each with a trash bin. One store door was open. Everyone was walking towards the open door. A bright light was streaming from the inside. I didn’t want to follow everyone into that light, but my feet would not change direction. As we walked through the doorway, through the white light, I recognized the architect office where I had inquired about buying one of the paintings in the window. Everyone from the trolley was walking down the center of the room where, on either side there were cubicles where men were working at desks with rulers, T-squares, and blueprints. The file of passengers continued walking through the white haze, towards the brighter light coming through the door at the end of the aisle. At the end of the aisle was another door where a man in a red beret and a black artist’s frock stood, collecting the paintings from each passenger as they passed by. When I got to the doorway where he was standing, he took a painting from the window and placed my painting in its place in the window. He placed the painting from the window in my hand. It was the one I had inquired about.

“Keep moving,” the conductor’s voice commanded. I walked through the door and found myself back on the street in front of the store. A sign above the door read, ‘’Wanted: Art Connoisseur.’ A ringing noise filled my head. The alarm clock was pinging on my phone. It was time to get out of bed and see Wednesday, the day I would start my new job with the Portland Art Connoisseur Collective Gallery.

 [CB1]

 [CB2]