The Dustbin Artist … (another short story)

I had just finished my grocery shopping for the week and was driving out of the parking lot when I espied several empty picture frames leaning up against a pile of rubbish. Ever on the look-out for nice frames for my own paintings I stopped the car, went over and took a look. There were three of poor quality and one of better quality with an oil painting in it.

It was not a particularly GOOD painting. It was very amateurish in technique.  The colours were way off for ‘realism’. There was no real skill in it.  It lacked the sophistication & painterly pretense of a ‘serious’ artist. No, it was essentially a private piece, heart-felt & honest, and I liked it.

The mountain range, the clouds and the overwhelming conifer forest were rendered with a kind of attentive knowing. Nature was the larger focus of this simple untutored work. The little misshaped log cabin, massively disproportionate to the overbearing landscape, was the only human element in it. In fact, the cabin was the only clue that Man was even there at all.

The painting had a strange resonance with the ‘familiar’ from both ‘European Alpine landscapes’ and ‘the Canadian Rockies’. Yet, overall, the subject matter seemed more a reverie, or a remembrance of another time, another era. The ‘old world’ and the ‘new’ were colliding within the mind of the painter.

I doubted that it was a Real Place in Time & Space – though it might have been. It seemed more a place of longing, a fantasy piece, a desired place of gentle solitude among the magnificence of a Grandeur Design.

In the right-hand corner was the artist’s signature, H.Goebol, a european name. Who was this? Hendrick? Henrietta? Howard? Helena? Was ‘H’ a retired untutored lumberjack or a pining European maiden stuck now in suburbia?  Hortense? Harold? Heidi?

And why was it in the dustbin?

Was the artist dead? Was it in the rubbish as a result of a ‘clean up & clear out’ by uninterested relatives? Or, did the artist just tire of their own effort? Were they discouraged? Beaten? Had they given up on their dream, their longing?

I loaded the piece into the back of my car.

Goebel’s work now hangs in the guest bedroom at the lakehouse. It is visible to the eye every time anyone walks down the hall.  It continues to beckon, to invite, to welcome all in.

Goebol.  H . Goebol.  Dustbin artist.