Page 56 - WTP XII #3

The Green Man (continued from preceding page)
cause Mom couldn’t stand the sight of it. An unsigned, undated self-portrait. Dad in his forties, his skin a queasy modeling-clay green, the background vermil- lion, black hair, thick black glasses, beady black eyes. As kids, it wasn’t hard to imagine Dad turned that color when he was mad. Now it’s a family treasure. Our Starry Night or Las Meninas.
~
In my virgin efforts at writing nonfiction, I published essays about my father, culminating in an art book/ memoir with a small press (The Reluctant Artist, Shanti Arts, 2015). While working on the art book about Dad, I contacted modern art pundits and ac- claimed artists who were his contemporaries. An artist whose work reminded me of Dad’s, Profes-
sor Emeritus at the art school he’d graduated from, agreed to provide a blurb for the book. In his email response, the artist wrote something along these lines, I like a lot of his art. But what really strikes me is what a lovely thing this is for a daughter to do. What a touching tribute to your father.
Though pleased to receive the blurb, I was disappoint- ed that the artist made it about me. I now concede my efforts on my father’s behalf—none of which I would have dared undertake while he was alive—were driven by my own long suppressed hopes and dreams of being a writer, a creative person in my own right, as much as they were by the need to celebrate my father.
While I still believe in its intrinsic merit, I can also ap- preciate that channeling my own creative energy
into writing about my Dad and his accomplishments became a safe, buffered entre into creative writing. Lacking faith in my own untested skills, I piggy- backed on his. He was my creative beard.
After a dozen queries to galleries and California mu- seums, but ultimately thanks to a good friend’s intro- duction to the gallery’s curator, I secured a modest show for six large, bold geometric abstractions from the sixties and seventies, a springboard, I believed, to world-class museums clamoring for a Joe Rice of their very own.
To date, that one posthumous exhibit, at a local com- munity college with no other connection to my dad, a show shared with two other artists, remains the only public display of his work. There has been no boot- legging of Joe Rice images so far as I can tell. Nor any museums clamoring for his work.
My sisters and I now wonder what will become of all of it when we’re gone. I’m discovering it’s a common
conundrum for family collections of art and other memorabilia—stuff that’s valuable to the few, rather than the many. Safe storage costs a small fortune. Few of our kids have homes with walls large enough to accommodate the paintings. Then there’s the mat- ter of taste. Not all of our children or grandchildren would even want Dad’s art on display in their homes. Faceless nudes with distorted limbs and sickly skin tones, disturbing surrealistic imagery—not to every- one’s taste, much as they often creeped Mom out.
~
I was at his Sonoma bedside in the days before Dad died. I hold no allusions that he asked for me. His wife had phoned.
“If you want to see him, you’d better come quick. Tell your sisters.”
She was only doing her duty by us. Likely, one of his caregivers suggested she call.
When we arrived, he appeared lifeless, on his back in the hospital bed set up in what had been his studio, canvasses still stacked against the wall and crammed into the closet, shelves with paints, brushes and unglazed ceramics over the wheezing oxygen pump. Eyes closed, hands resting atop a thin blanket, his rattling breath had the relentlessness of the surf, encroaching and receding, followed by that moment when the water is sucked out to sea and you imagine it might never return.
Dad’s wife left us with him. Not only because of the palpable animosity. I imagine she needed a break.
A no-nonsense hospice worker arrived.
“He’s actively dying,” she said, switching the oxygen pump off. She removed the tubing from his nostrils, demonstrated how to administer the bright red liquid morphine every hour and how to daub Dad’s parched lips with a chunk of moist sponge on a stick.
He sucked in his breath and held it, suspended. We held ours until he exhaled.
“The apnea is part of the process,” she explained. “The body resting in its work. Don’t try to wake him.”
We took turns reading out loud. The hospice worker said our voices might provide some comfort. I doubt- ed mine would, but he couldn’t object. We read from the crime blotter in the local newspaper, always good for a few chuckles, then chapters from a favorite book, Paul Theroux, The Happy Isles of Oceania.
49