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 32-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
The words are directly out of my yet-to-be published novel The Black Dot Museum Of Political Art where they provide background to the protagonist’s parents, a pair of artists who met in the 1950s. While the protagonist and the art she makes are not me and the art I make, I’ll cop to this description being very much like a description of my own parents.
Art Was the Great Leveler
They met at a party given by mutual friends—people named Fortune. She always liked that part of the story. They were both painters who loved nothing more than to pack up their watercolor gear and hike into the local mountains to paint landscapes. She was young and captivated by his charm and impressed with his brash, unschooled talent. Which side of town they were from wasn’t a big enough issue to keep them apart.
Art was the great leveler and an emotional connection formed.
Art was the great leveler long before it was common to assess personalities, long before people were talking about other people’s personalities in terms of why such attractions developed. It would be rationalized based on their mutual interest in art, art and hiking.
Art was the great leveler.
There was something else there. A dance. A dance, of sorts. A dance. They were doing a dance—one in which it was difficult to tell just by looking who was leading and who was following.
Art was the great leveler.
They regularly heaved out an arsenal of verbal weaponry to defend and protect the mysteries of their deficiencies from possible detection. Impossible detection was their goal. Art was the great leveler. They hid as much as they exposed.
“Art Was The Great Leveler” from the album Empathy For The Evil (M’Lady’s, 2014) (download):
