Last year, I lost one of my oldest (in duration, not in age) friends. I recently learned that there is going to be a kind of memorial exhibition of his work—and his widow asked me to say a few words at the event’s opening. I’ve been thinking that I needed to write something about him, and when I started writing a collection of short pieces about people I’ve met (or imagined I’ve met), it was clear that I had more than one reason for writing the piece—a first draft—posted below.
Postcards
The fifth of September 1961 was the first day of ninth grade. Third period, that morning, was Basic Art—my first serious art course, and the first time I shared a classroom with “the big kids” (tenth-graders, a few eleventh- and even some twelfth-graders).
One of those tenth-graders was Tom Stratton.
Over the next three years, Tom and I shared two more art classes—first Sculpture, then Painting. During that time, Tom got his driver’s license—which provided an introduction to terror—but that’s a subject for another time. By the time we were in Painting together, several class members were beginning to pattern themselves as beatniks (the only form of bohemianism any of us knew at the time).
Tom was not one of them.
An abstract expressionist painter, back then, had asserted that, “it’s no longer possible to paint landscapes.” Tom didn’t listen.
While some of us affected the stylings of the avant-garde in our work, Tom did not. He just painted landscapes and scenes of rural America. Consequently, he was mocked as a “painter of postcards.” If it bothered him, he never showed it.
He just kept painting.
After high school, Tom left for college in New Paltz. I still saw him, regularly, and even followed him there a year later. Over the years, I may have experimented with various styles of art, but Tom kept painting his “postcards.”
Eventually, we even shared living space in a studio (where it was illegal for us to live—which was about as close to a bohemian life-style as Tom was likely to live). Through it all, he produced a steady stream of “postcards,” mostly in watercolor. While I went through phases of painting, photography, and illustration—before abandoning visual art for writing—Tom never stopped painting his “postcards”—gradually incorporating all aspects of rural life into his compositions.
Clearly, Tom had a vision of what country life was like—or, at least, what it was supposed to look like. Many of his paintings were close-up views of country scenes that were devoid of people—an empty porch, a clothesline billowing in the wind, an abandoned tractor or pick-up truck, a few flowers in a milk bottle, a basket of just-picked fruit (with no sign of the picker). The human presence was always felt, but not always shown. Because his paintings were deceptively subtle, it took me an unconscionably long time to recognize what he had been doing during the sixty-odd years that we knew each other.
I now believe that they were postcards, in the sense that they were personal messages that were invisibly inscribed, “Wish you were here.”
One of the last times I saw him, lying in a hospital bed, I at least got a chance to apologize: “We used to make fun of you for painting postcards, but—of all of us—it turns out that you were the only one who truly lived the life of an artist.”
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Thanx, Linda... it's been a long time for all of us!
Thanx, Dianne... for both.