Photo of found painting courtesy of the author.
By Tzvi Silver
A year and a half ago I was driving around with a friend and she spotted a free pile on Division Street that seemed especially lucrative. I slammed on the breaks. There was a huge canvas in the pile, done up in unpleasant colors: pukey purple mixed with mustard yellow, blacks and greys, muddled blue. My first impression was that it being free outweighed it being ugly. I’d bring it home as a talking point, to fit the shabby-classy Olympia student aesthetic. The image was appropriately abstract, then. It was like a puzzle: I could identify a drooping head, a long ungulate leg, curved fan blades, but I couldn’t put it all together.
After a few days in which the painting sat on the floor, propped up against my bedroom wall, three distinct forms clicked into place. This is a painting of a purple deer, a yellow body, and a blue ceiling fan. I hung it under a wall light in a room with minimal natural light. It was only then that I realized I didn’t like this painting, and not only because the colors are uninviting. There was something haunted about it, but when I moved across the west side, I took it with me anyway.
Once I wrote a poem about the way this one carpet in a house I lived in curled in on itself. I wrote about the carpet because I needed to call a witness. White carpet, with pearls of acrylic fiber, and it felt this way on my face, another way in my fingers. This wasn’t in Olympia. The poem I wrote cannot be found on the roadside. I am seeking the artist: What did you hold on to when you let go of the painting?
All three forms meet and become indistinct at the place where the fan blades touch the neck of the ceiling light. Here, black strokes which should delineate form instead confuse the distinct into something indistinct. There are extra lines, which go nowhere and to me say nothing, and lines that are missing or warped. The curve of the deer’s back dissolves and is lost until its back legs emerge. The body is only distinct in toes, knees, shoulder, back. For weeks, I was unsure how to hang the painting, which is why it stayed on the carpet. Which way was up when you painted it? Personally, I have settled on this configuration, all heads downwards, deer and fan correctly positioned, human upside down. All three forms create a large X, which is right-ways up in either direction.
Now I have a document of something you didn’t want hanging in my living room. If I were you I might wonder what happened to my painting, so I wanted to reach out. The ceiling fan is the aspect I understand the best because every sentence has a subject, an object, and a ceiling fan. I wonder if the body and the deer spin.
