Sometimes I think back to all of the other poor saps who went to art school along with me. They were once familiar faces, but now a lot of them are shriveled up to being indiscernible (“What IS that?…Oh! It’s Phyllis.”) or dead. I don’t know much about many of them anymore, but I do know that our nemesis is safely in the grave. Norman was such an asshole. He would tag our artwork with smudges of sticky goo and grease marks, and during critiques he was the worst. He would demand that his abstract works go first so that he could mock everyone else’s work without repercussion by saying irrelevant things like, “I like red.” or “She ugly” or “Pretty flower” or “Daddy, I don’t want nap” and then he inevitably would fall asleep at the back of the room on blankets the professor would bring in. We drooled over his name-brand snack crackers and licorice as we all survived on potatoes. Norm was a heartless midget, and I always got the feeling the professor favored him from the way the professor carried him around the room and gave him rides to and from class.
Forty-five years later, he died of frozen. (What do you call it when people die of freezing to death?) Anyway, that’s what he did down in Antarctica. That’ll teach him for getting a grant and being smug about it on the front page of the local newspaper. After brushing off the frost, only three paintings survived his fancy fatal Antarctic landscape series.
He could have done these same works had he just squinted at his warm living room wall, but to his defense, people really like it when an artist dies for his/her work. It suddenly makes the paintings intense, and we look at them with morbid fascination, such as I wonder if he knew he was going to croak as he made that brush stroke, or is “View from the Tent” actually done or did death cheat the finishing touches? I wonder if the freezing process was slow or sudden. Which froze first – his unused arm or his tiny legs?
Unfinished works are the best. They express that the artist was just as surprised as the rest of us, as if to say “Wow, I really didn’t see that coming.”
Unfortunately, I didn’t go to his viewing, nor have I seen him since the college days. I heard it was a real riot and Barbara brought her wonderful fruit salad to the luncheon after the burial. Nobody makes fruit salad like Barbara. I really missed out.
The Delightfully Resentful Sketchbook of Gladys Ruby 