There was a John Mellencamp album from 1990, Big Daddy, that had a song with the line ” Henry sent a postcard from a better place…” There’s something in that line that has stuck in my memory far more than the original song and always comes to mind when I receive a postcard from friends or family. I thought of it yesterday when I received this postcard from a friend I know through my paintings who now lives in Slovakia.
It’s an image of the painting Vier Baume ( Four Trees) from the great Austrian painter Egon Schiele whose work has always captivated me. He saw it while visiting the Belvedere Museum in Vienna and it reminded him of my paintings, joking that this Schiele guy must have been influenced by GC Myers. His mother, a lovely woman who I know and who was visiting with him there, added the line, “If only he’d thought to put a red chair in the tree!” Gave me a chuckle.
One of the little perks of doing this is having my work connect with people and have them tell me of how they are reminded of this at different times in their travels. I posted a photo here last year that was given to me at a gallery talk by a man who saw this tiny, tiny island off the coast of Venezuela with a single twisted tree atop it. It reminded him of one of my paintings and he was kind enough to snap a photo of it for me.
These little gestures mean an awful lot to me as small validations of the strength and voice of the work. When I’m painting in the solitude of my studio I can only hope that the piece I’m at work on will have such an impact to make someone far removed think of it beyond the moment when they actually see it. There’s something comforting to me in this thought.
Perhaps the postcards sent are because these folks view my painting as a sort of postcard from a better place.
Who knows?
Redtree Times 