Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 29-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
Poking around in his childhood room, Frank pulls out his collection of atlases and books of aerial photography. Perfect, he thinks. He also wants a small selection of paintings—both parents’ paintings—work that hadn’t sold. Frank knows the paintings well. Julia’s homey winter scenes, predecessors to her critically acclaimed winter scenes at night, where figures walked assertively across snowy moonlit fields, presumably back in Iowa, where she grew up. Something about men striding through a dark landscape resonated with art-buyers baffled by the abstract expressionism of the day.
Among his father’s paintings is Pointy White Mountain. Frank chuckles at the now-distant memory of giving his father’s paintings their titles, how this one hadn’t sold because there was no white in it. The gallery owner had sent it back before Gordon’s show, unwilling to hang it unless Gordon added a token amount of white to the pinks and oranges flanked by the grays of sky and sea.
“I am not inclined to do any such thing,” Gordon bellowed into the phone. “I am the artist and I will call my god-damned paintings anything I god-damn well want to. I’ll call the next one Gallery Owner With His Head Up His Ass if I feel like it.”
Frank, pressed up against the wall in the living room, didn’t understand that Gordon’s anger came from the fear of anyone finding out that he had no idea what the titles of his paintings referred to, what the titles meant.
“Convince Yourself,” from The Family Swan (Kill Rock Stars, 2002) (download):
