Day 6: Photo #1

Tom was nervous, but he shouldn't have been.  He had been through the same process hundreds of times before, but today would mark his fiftieth visit to a gallery without any interest in his portfolio.  In fact, he hadn't sold a work, either through a gallery or on his own, in over three years.  A friend suggested he set up a shop on Etsy and try selling them there, but a quick perusal of the site revealed it horrendously oversupplied with art.  Art with bird appliques, modge podged wooden pieces, sailboat landscapes, too-adorable squirrels, 70s throwback mushrooms and owls, photographs of dandelions blowing in the wind.  Exhausting.  It exhausted him to take it all in.

No, he would sell the old-fashioned way, he supposed, though he merely considered it the serious way.  He was a serious artist, with serious credentials.  There was a day where the name Tom Fowler had meant something, where gallery directors would have been clamoring to get him in the door.  But something had happened, he wasn't sure what.  He heard repeatedly that there just "isn't an interest in abstract expressionism," they said.  As if what he did was that, was dripping and smearing paint.  How, in fifteen years, had so much changed?

His best year, most prolific, most creative, most driven year had been 1998.  He was working alongside a studio partner who sculpted and the partnership seemed inspirational for both of them.  She liked to sculpt in the early morning, he as the sun filtered through in the late afternoon.  They were rarely there at the same time, but each days' progress could be inspected, was noticed by someone else.  Also, that same year, his second daughter had been born: fat, long and dark.  She rarely cried.  Something about her was a mystery to him, but not in the way everything about Cecilia, his first daughter, had been a mystery.  He put diapers on the right way, he understood he needed extra clothes for them.  Maeve was a mystery because she was an observer, often babbling, but plaintively, as though she knew a lament for every new discovery in life.  As though she understood the stark dualities of life.  He took her to the studio when he could, and painted dark, dark paintings.  Dark orbs, floating in an etherial mist, dark shapeless blossoms unfolding into a darker plane.  People bought them and, frankly, he didn't understand why.  Maeve grew into a quiet child, sadder than he might have imagined possible.  And he did not want to imagine anymore.   He stopped bringing her to the studio, but Tom did not change his medium and did not stop painting at dusk.  His sculptor rented her space to someone else and Maeve took up painting.  Ultimately, Tom changed his palette, because Maeve simply could not.  Jungles, webs and snakes at first.  Then, broken tables and chairs; knives with handles, grooved for fists; savage rhinoceros.  Maeve turned eyes into gaping holes.