Wyatt LeGrand: November 2019

Wednesday, November 27, 2019

Lesson Learned

Whitewater River

oil on canvas

12" x 16"

It's beautiful morning on the fringes of nowhere. My good pal Larry and I had set out to paint pictures of the river. We grab our gear, walk down the bank a ways, and get to work with about thirty feet between us. When I finish my first painting of the river (above), I turn around and immediately begin a second painting of Larry (below). I do this quite often. I've got at least a dozen Larry paintings, most featuring his tattered IU ball cap. I think it's clever, I guess.

Larry, Painting a Picture of Me, Painting the Whitewater River

oil on canvas

8" x 10"

Within about 45 minutes, we pack up and head back to the van with wet paintings in tow. Larry asks his usual, "What'd ya get?" I humor him and prop my two paintings up against the door. He looks at the pictures, looks at me, and looks at the pictures again. I know Larry well enough to recognize when he's setting up a joke...

He leans in with a slight smirk and says, "Oh...you needed two canvases, huh?"

Larry props his single painting up between the two of mine...

"Amateur."

Larry's painting of the river and me (on just one canvas).

Sunday, November 24, 2019

Relatively Rural Reality

Metamorica

oil on canvas

12" x 16"

I was painting a street scene. Actually, I was painting a picture of a fire hydrant...half of a small Indiana town just so happened to fall in the background. Midway through my depiction of Midwestern quaintness, a voice from behind me barked, "What're you doing?" I turned around to find a ragged woman in a green jacket standing less than ten feet away, peeling raw meat from the carcass of a small animal. I replied, "Just painting a picture...how are you this evening?" She walked towards me, elbow deep in what appeared to be some some type of roadkill/dinner/Halloween-decoration endeavor. With only the stench of death between us, she locked two very squinted eyes upon my bewildered face and said, "I'll show you where they keep the cross." She walked past me, past the fire hydrant and past the house on the corner. She didn't look back. She walked past the church, a long shadow cast to her side, the carcass she carried now plucked clean to the bone. She crossed the highway and disappeared. Lumps of meat lie along her path.

A wraith, a phantom, a ghost...

or Becky...

That was her name, Becky. Or at least, she was answering to that handle when I crossed paths with her again that same evening, no more than two hours later. She was sitting at a table catty-cornered to my own at a popular restaurant about ten miles from where I last saw her. She had transformed into the most charming person in the room, the center of attention among those in her dinner party. She was wearing the same green jacket, but there was no evidence of the animal remains. As I left my table and headed for the the door, she discovered me a second time and yelled out, "Hey Picasso!" I was trapped between her squinty gaze and my own confusion. She introduced me as the artist from Metamora, the town where we'd had our strange encounter just moments ago. "Can you believe that," she exclaimed to her tablemates, "an artist from Metamora!" I smiled and gave a little wave of acknowledgement to Becky and her friends as I tucked my tail in and walked away. I felt pretty ridiculous for a man without a dead animal in tow.

I left the restaurant dumbfounded. I walked across the parking lot and then down the street, pondering the evening's paradox and accrediting the irony to my own imagination. After staring at my steps for several blocks, I picked my chin off my chest just in time to see a silhouette moving towards me. It moved past a series of dumpsters, past the house on the corner and then past the fire hydrant just a few feet away. I was frozen. It made a beeline to where I stood, its shadow now distinct from its alien form. At my feet crouched a small, ragged animal. It never looked up. Before I had a chance to identify the creature, it scurried across the road and out of sight. I squinted my eyes and peered into the darkness, but it was gone.

A beast, a brute, a demon...

My head fell forward in another bout of disbelief while my eyes fixated on a new shadow. "X" marked the spot where I now stood. I followed the longer of the two lines that had converged beneath my feet. It slashed across a mailbox, over the hood of a minivan, and towards a brick building to my left. The shadow crept up the masonry wall, across an air conditioner, and through the open window of a second floor apartment. When my eyes finally reached the sky and the roof lines that framed it, I discovered a nearly full moon providing the light the shadows needed. Between the moon and I, a cross.