I was known as "the artist" when I was a teenager, maybe the best artist in my small high school at the time. I became part of the art world early.
One time we had a substitute teacher in the art room. She took herself seriously as an artist - beatnik. She showed up wearing a black felt tammy over her hair and a long white shirt. She took her brush out and started painting over my painting of an imaginary landscape. Apparently my face fell. Though she probably meant to show me a technique, with one of her own brushes, rather than the ratty old brushes my football obsessed high school managed to budget for, when my face fell other students noticed. They corralled me to tell me they saw my face and that it fell and commiserated. How I must have felt.
So this was a small canvas that I was working on. The school budget was so dishonoring of artists that teachers had to go to thrift stores and buy used canvases they thought could be reused.
I was dating someone who had a car. Maybe one of the few who had a car of his own and an allowance to put gas in it. Apparently a lot of people called him for transportation. One woman in particular. When she heard he was dating me, she wasn't pleased. He wasn't on call for rides anymore. So one day she went into the art room and gessoed over my almost complete landscape. I got there just in time to identify this canvas as mine and to wash the gesso off before it dried. Painting saved.
So the painting was then exhibited in one of those glassed-in cases down the hall from the art room. A student one year ahead of me apparently felt competitive. He went in there and without permission took my painting down and put his up. He was caught.
A teacher took his down and put mine back up. (He would also compete with me to design his senior class play set. Actually his set was much better because the play he was working on was far more interesting than my senior class play. He went on to be the set designer for a city theater. He managed to give me a dirty look or act haughty when we passed each other in the halls for a year. Rarely was anyone so jealous of me.
My landscape I gifted to my boyfriend with the car. His mother was proud of the painting or maybe even me. I watched as she got a nail and hammered it into the plaster. She hung the painting up above the entrance to his bedroom door. This was a very big deal. His father had designed the house to have perfect thick plaster.
We broke up. I don't know what happened to the painting after that. I have a vague memory of the size and composition of the landscape. I recall that I put a sun in it. There were long grasses.
I suspect that one day my painting was thrown in the trash or maybe donated. But you never know. It might still hang on a wall somewhere with my painterly name in the corner using a very fine brush.
C Christine Trzyna 2018
