Reverie

At some point in my childhood my mother bought a piece of artwork and hung it in the living room.  I remember gazing at it often with childish wonder.  The journalist’s questions always going through my mind:  Who? Where? What?  The one question I didn’t need to ask was when.   That answer never changes because it is always now, the very moment we are facing an image that arouses and engages every time we’re in front of it.

Decades have come and gone since Mom and Dad celebrated holidays and birthdays in that living room and since I played games there on rainy afternoons after school.  What eight-year old thinks about artwork and images?  I never did.  

Recently my brother was going through his portfolios and throwing out a lot of his work from FIT and Pratt Institute.  He had them ready for the next day’s trash collection in big black zippered cases sitting by the front door.  Out of a vague curiosity I began leafing through his work. 

I was doing it with mild interest until I saw a print that he’d folded in half to keep his assignments together.  There it was.  The centerpiece of our midcentury living room, an iconic remnant of my childhood life! 

“Steve, how could you do this?” I shrieked.  “I love this picture and I’ve always wondered where it went.”

“I was just using it as folder for my designs.  I never liked it, it’s so depressing,” said the visual artist in the family.

“I wish you hadn’t creased it, but I am going to frame it.” 

Five weeks later I picked it up from the frame shop and hung it in my dinette on the wall facing the living room so I can see it from three rooms:  the kitchen, the dinette and the living room.  It is titled “Day Dreaming” and dated 1964.  The artist is Christian Larsen.  I have the foggiest memory of my mother acquiring  it when she and her sister were at an exhibit for an international children’s organization.

Hope it warms your heart the way it never fails to for me.  It benefits me greatly to eat my dinner in the room where it hangs.  Sometimes it reminds me how blessed a life I lead.  Other times it transports me in time as I marvel while peering at it. Mostly it brings me joy.

 

Yvonne A.

Sept. 2020