“Then everything’s set,” she said, clasping her hands together, her face looking relaxed for the first time since she arrived. “It’ll be nice to be busy.”
After I finished my breakfast, I walked Gabe out to the car. “I’ll come by and pick up the painting today. We need to get it hung. I think D-Daddy has the alarm situation under control.”
“It’s in my office closet,” Gabe said. “If I’m not there, ask Maggie for the key.”
I kissed him quickly, touched his smooth, cool cheek. “You doing all right?”
He gave me a perplexed look and opened his car door. “Of course, why wouldn’t I be?”
I just shook my head. “See you tonight.”
Within the hour, I was dressed, had dropped Boo off and was in my office at the folk art museum, my books and articles on outsider art spread across my desk. Mondays were always quiet. It was the only day the museum was closed. The artists’ studios were open, but not many people were working. I could hear a distant buzz coming from the woodworking room and some muffled conversation from the large room where the quilters and weavers met. I’d run into D-Daddy coming through the museum where he was painting some trim in back of the main gallery.
“Alarm people gave us the all clear,” he said. “We’re ready to rock and roll.” He grinned at me, his bright blue eyes lively under his thick, white pompadour.
“Rock and roll?” I said, laughing. “You’ve been hanging around the young folks again?”
He gave me a mischievous look. “Not young people. People your age. Young people, they rap and roll.”
“Ouch. Don’t remind me. If anyone needs me, this old fogey will be in her office working on her speech. I can’t believe we’re opening on Wednesday.”
“We’ll be ready,” he said.
“I know you’ll be.” I wasn’t so sure about me.
“Constance already called twice today,” he called after me. “I told her I didn’t know when you’d be comin’ in.”
“Bless you,” I called back.
I was determined to avoid Constance until I finished my speech. This obsession with Pinky’s death was taking up too much of my time. I’d done my due diligence and “investigated.” The next time we talked I vowed to put my foot down and tell Constance she needed to let her friend rest in peace.
MY MAJOR AT CAL POLY SAN CELINA HAD BEEN HISTORY, so I always looked forward to the research aspect of my job. My special love had always been oral history, specifically the history of everyday people. It had always intrigued me more than the exploits and accomplishments of the famous. Outsider art was essentially the oral history equivalent in the art world. Whether it be quilts or woodcarving or weaving or pottery, it was the art of the average man and woman.
I looked through my extensive notes and flipped through the dozen or so books I’d ordered from Elvia about folk and outsider art. The area was larger than most people realized, encompassing a vast number of regions and cultures. And that was just in the United States. Folk art from other countries was a whole other, incredible world. I couldn’t even begin to delve into that with this speech. I would have to restrict myself to the United States.
One of the amazing things about folk art was how a figure carved by an unschooled black man in rural Alabama was so similar to carvings found in nineteenth-century Africa. The same with quilt designs from an elderly white woman in the hills of West Virginia and the obvious pattern influence of her ancient Celtic relative two hundred years before. Had these patterns and skills been passed down through the generations? Many scholars thought it possible.
How to start? I tapped my pencil on my blank tablet for about ten minutes before deciding to just dive in. Usually, once I started writing, it came easier.
“Outsider art. What is it exactly? We might ask, what is it outside of? Who is the insider? Who came up with the term anyway?”
I put my pencil down. That sounded awful. Like something a middle school kid would write. I leaned back in my chair and stared at the ceiling. Maybe I should start with Abe Adam Finch’s biography and then delve into the definition of outsider.
I dug out the three articles I’d found written about him. A couple of the articles speculated that he suffered from a form of agoraphobia, but it was just that, speculation. It was believed he lived somewhere in Nevada because all of his communication was done through his niece, Nola Maxwell Finch, who, before she moved to San Celina, lived in Las Vegas. All requests for face-to-face interviews were refused, though he had been known to answer questions through the mail. There was only one small photo of him, taken in profile, backlit so that his features weren’t distinguishable. He appeared to be extremely thin, with a hawkish nose. In both photos he wore a fedora-style hat pulled down over his eyebrows.
“Abe Adam Finch,” I wrote. “He was born in 1929, the same year the stock market fell, though he said the event didn’t really affect his family, since they were already poor. He was the middle of nine children, the son of a cotton sharecropper in Mississippi. As soon as he could walk, he picked cotton, took care of cows and chickens, baled hay. He went to a local one-room schoolhouse when he could but never made it past sixth grade. He remembers liking school, especially when the teacher allowed him to sit in the back and ‘draw his pictures.’ He felt compelled to draw and paint from his earliest memory. In 1946, when he was seventeen, he left home, hitchhiking around the country. World War II had just ended, and the economy was starting to boom. He worked throughout the West at a large variety of manual labor jobs digging ditches, hauling bricks, laying pipe, trimming trees.
“‘I was always the one helping,’ he answered one journalist’s questions. ‘Never the man in charge. That was okay by me. I tended to daydream a bit. My pictures, they were talking to me in my head and telling me how to paint ’em.’ An unfortunate accident at a lumberyard in Oregon blinded him in one eye. He credits that incident with forcing him to start painting seriously. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe it just come to me when that wood chip took my eye that life is short. You got to go where your heart leads while it is still beating. I just love to paint my trees.’
“He burst into the art world ten years ago, coming virtually from nowhere, it seemed, when Lionel Bachman, a San Francisco art collector, saw one of his paintings in a souvenir shop in Las Vegas. Critics have praised Mr. Finch’s work for its use of vibrant, often unpredictable color combinations, its childlike energy and its celebration of the relationship between the animal and human world. Various critics have said his work shows an almost obsessive energy, an unpolished directness that, one critic noted, made him sense that Abe Adam Finch might well be an artistic savant.”
What did the critic mean by that? That Mr. Finch was, somehow, mentally challenged? Was that the reason his niece protected his privacy so diligently? In the few places where he was quoted from questions mailed to him from journalists, he sounded like anyone else. Then again, anyone, including his niece, could have written out the answers to those questions.
I stood up and stretched. It really didn’t matter. What I had ferreted out about him seemed like enough background for my talk. Most of it I took from his official biography. The articles I’d found all told the same story, gave the same quotes and then were filled in with the art journalist’s critique of Abe Adam’s work, speculation about why he was a recluse and sometimes their own adventures in hunting him down. All efforts to find him eventually came to a dead end. They commented on the friendliness of Nola Maxwell Finch, but her absolute dedication to keeping the public, especially journalists, away from her reclusive uncle. I contemplated calling her and asking if she could add a little something to his biography, something that would make the journalist coming from the L.A. Times actually write an article longer than two sentences.
As quickly as I considered it, I discarded that thought. We were lucky enough to be given this painting. I was sure she wouldn’t appreciate yet another person wanting a little something more about her uncle.
>
I sat back down. Okay, I had the part about him ready. Now I had to get my own talk about outsider art done. I glanced at my watch. It was already ten a.m. I picked up the phone and called Elvia at the bookstore.
“Hey, little mama, ready to do some shopping?” I had to finish this speech, but right now even clothes shopping, something I didn’t particularly enjoy, seemed more appealing.
“What are you trying to avoid?” Elvia asked, knowing me too well.
I groaned dramatically. “I’m trying to write my speech for the exhibit opening this Wednesday night, and everything I write sounds stupid.”
“What’s the problem? You’ve given talks before. What’s so different about this one?”
I sighed, leaned back in my chair. “Nothing. I think I’m just sleep-deprived and worried about Gabe and his mother. I think there’s something going on in her life.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Ray is acting kind of strange.” I told her his cryptic remark last night.
“That does sound like he’s trying to tell you something. Why don’t you just ask him if there’s something wrong?”
“I’ve thought of that, but my big fear is he’ll tell me. Then I’ll have to make the decision about whether I should tell Gabe or let his mother tell him.”
“Gabe hasn’t noticed anything strange?”
I sighed. “I think Gabe is too busy throwing a pity party for himself because someone’s taking his papa’s place.” Then I felt guilty for my snide remark. “Oh, strike that last comment. I know Gabe is going through a tough time trying to get over his cousin’s death. This anger over the change with his mother’s life is just a symptom. I’m going to see Father Mark, see if he can talk to Gabe.”
“Or you could step back,” Elvia said. “Let him deal with it when he is ready.”
“Easy for you to say,” I replied, cranky that she was echoing what Dove suggested. “You don’t have to live right in the middle of this little drama.”
She was wisely silent, obviously realizing that I didn’t actually want advice but someone to listen to my whining.
“Look,” she said. “I’m going to be the best friend I can and tell you we’ll go shopping at one p.m. after you’ve finished your speech. You’ll be much happier once you get it done. Just pretend it’s a term paper.”
“That doesn’t help,” I moaned.
“Get to work. Meet me at the store at one.” Then she hung up.
“Nyah, nyah, nyah,” I said to the buzzing dial tone. But she was right. I would be happier if I could mark this off my to-do list. Before I went back to my speech, I called Beebs and Millee to invite them over for supper and tree-trimming.
“That sounds delightful,” Beebs said. “What shall we bring?”
“This time, do not bring a thing. Kathryn wants to do it all.”
“In that case, we’ll just bring our hungry appetites.”
“Always appreciated at a dinner party,” I agreed.
I marked them off my list. Then I called Dove. “Hey, Gramma, what’s cookin’?”
“Apple butter,” she said.
“Yum. Are you busy for dinner? We’re having an impromptu tree trimming supper tonight.”
“Wish I could, but I have an emergency knitting club meeting.”
I laughed. “What kind of emergency could a knitting club have?”
“Christmas stockings for foster kids. We were supposed to have a hundred stockings knitted, and there’s only seventy-three. Emergency knit-in at Thelma’s house tonight.”
“Okay, I’ll let you off the hook.”
“Har, har,” Dove said. “That would be funny if we were crocheting, not knitting.”
“Kathryn’s cooking, but I’ll tell her you have a good excuse.”
“Sorry to miss that. Tell her I’ll see her Wednesday night at your museum shindig.”
“Is Sam there?”
“Nope, he left early this morning. Got to get back to my apples. Over and out.”
“A big ten-four, good buddy.”
I hoped no one ever overheard my conversations with my gramma.
I hung up the phone and contemplated calling around to the possible four or five places Sam might be. No, that would have to take a backseat to finishing my speech. He usually worked two or three afternoons at Blind Harry’s. I’d call there as soon as I finished.
I set aside my list and looked back at my half-written speech. “Oh, just get to it,” I murmured and started writing.
“Outsider art is the latest label given to works of art made by non-mainstream, untrained and, until recently, unexhibited artists. It has been referred to throughout art history as folk art, self-taught art, visionary art, naive art, primitive art, intuitive art and even by the somewhat snooty-sounding term art brut.” I crossed out snooty-sounding and inserted academic. Snooty-sounding seemed more accurate to me, but I didn’t want to alienate part of my audience . . . at least not with my first paragraph.
“Originally, the creation of outsider art tended to be for the purposes of recording memories or made for use, such as quilts made for warmth rather than decoration, or were the revelations or expounding of religious stories and beliefs. Today’s outsider art is broader. Like mainstream art, it often portrays the artist’s very personal feelings about politics, consumer culture, racism, the war between social or economic classes and environmentalism, but the lines between art made to be used—craft and design—and art made to be contemplated—painting, drawing and sculpture—become blurred within the outsider art world. The art establishment and the public have been forced to consider the term outsider and what it implies. We might ask, outside compared to what? Is high art or fine art necessarily more inside, implying superior? One distinction between outsider and mainstream art has always been the economic, social or intellectual status of the artists themselves. Outsider art has often been thought of as the ‘art born of adversity,’ where the artist’s poverty, illiteracy, incarceration or mental illness becomes as much a part of the ‘outsiderness’ as the art itself.”
“Outsiderness?” I said out loud. “Is that even a word?”
“Sounds good to me,” a voice replied, startling me.
I jerked my head around to stare at the person in the doorway, embarrassed to be caught talking to myself. When I saw it was Nola Maxwell Finch, I was absolutely mortified.
“I’m sorry,” I said, standing up, my cheeks hot as a chili pepper. “I didn’t think anyone was around. I’m—”
She waved her hand at me to sit back down. “Oh, no, the apology should be mine. I shouldn’t have interrupted you. Mr. Boudreaux said I could find you back here.”
“No, it’s fine, really. I’m just working on this Wednesday’s speech. Please, come in and sit down. Is there something I can do for you?”
She stepped into my office, a serene smile on her face. She wore crisply pressed black slacks and a tan turtleneck sweater. I caught a light scent of exotic flowers. She sat down in the visitor’s chair and crossed her legs in a smooth, elegant gesture. “I was hoping to see where Uncle Abe’s painting would be displayed.”
“Absolutely,” I said, sitting back down. “But the painting isn’t actually here right now.” The alarmed look on her face caused me to add quickly, “Don’t worry, it’s at a place safer than Fort Knox. It’s in my husband’s office at work. He’s San Celina’s police chief.”
Her expression became calm again. “I suppose that’s about as well protected as it will ever be.”
I laughed nervously. “Our alarm system was being fixed. I was given the all clear this morning. I’m picking up the painting myself this afternoon. I can, however, show you where it will hang.”
“That would be lovely,” she said.
Sun dappled our faces as we walked under the vine-covered breezeway that led from the co-op buildings. We chatted about the cool, sunny weather we’d been having.
“I have to admit, the Central Coast’s beautiful weather
is what convinced me to settle down here,” Nola said, turning her face up to the sun. “It was getting so crowded and smoggy in Las Vegas. Tell me, do you ever have any bad weather here?”
“Not what others across the country would call bad weather. If it rains three or four days in a row, it is the lead story on the local news. And if there’s even a hint of humidity in the summer, people whine as if we lived in the tropics.” I gave a rueful laugh. “I’m almost embarrassed to tell you that. My dad calls the Central Coast bovine heaven.”
“People heaven too, then,” she said.
“Yes, it is hard to beat, weather-wise.” I glanced over at her, curiosity getting the better of me. “Will your uncle be moving here also?”
She didn’t seem ruffled by my question, obviously accustomed to curiosity about her uncle. “I doubt it. He’s happy where he is. His neighbors know him and take care of him. And he’s not that far from me.”
I noticed she never said exactly where he was. “You’re his only family?” I asked, opening the heavy back door to the museum, gesturing at her to go ahead of me.
She nodded and gave a small sigh. “Yes.” Her pale blue eyes looked over my shoulder, as if seeing something behind me, something that troubled her. “He’s getting so frail. I’m not sure how much longer he’ll be able to keep painting.” She looked back at me, staring right into my eyes. “Though this is not for public consumption, I’ll be honest with you, his arthritis is starting to really affect him, especially his hands.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, feeling flattered that she’d confide in me.
She brushed at imaginary lint on her sweater. “Well, he is getting up there in years. I think it is starting to show in his work, and I can’t help but wonder if I should subtly let it be known that he is having physical problems so that when the tone of his work changes, people don’t start gossiping. Also, we’ve had one case of a forgery, so if his signature changes slightly, I don’t want people to wonder.”
Tumbling Blocks Page 15
