I came across a small framed picture in the cellar of my aunt's house when we cleaned up after her death a few years ago. It had been rather informally framed in a cheap 1950s wooden frame and was mixed in with a whole bunch of miscellaneous old student work (her own and her students') that had been molding away down there for the past 50 or so years.
The picture seemed important enough that I did not pitch it into the dumpster along with the rest. I began to wonder if Alfonso Ossorio might not have left it with her. She got to know him when he was at the Portsmouth Priory School and at RISD, and they collaborated on the decoration of a church in the Philippines. So this was not the most unlikely assumption on my part.
Now, I have removed it from the frame and there appears to be an "AO" signature with an indication that it was done in the Philipine Islands in 1950. The irregular scrap of paper measures 11" in its longest length and 7.5" across its widest width. I've not seen a lot of Ossorios in person, but I know he did work in wax & watercolor about this time and that babies figured in some of this work. There is enough handwriting on the back that someone familiar with his autograph should be able to confirm the signature.
The painting has been returned to its frame, minus the corrosive old cardboard, and hangs on my wall. I am now forced to contemplate the fate of my own work after I leave this planet. T.'s father died the week before Christmas leaving an apartment full of stuff yet to be disposed of. I remember a news item during the bad old '80s about an artist in the West Village who died of AIDS and his entire studio went straight into the dumpster. My own work multiplies every time I get down to business and admit that I am an artist. In my entire career, until 3 years ago (which comprises nearly 40 years of wishing, hoping, dollars-down-the-drain, ass-kissing, licking wounds and hard, hard work), I had sold only 2 pieces. As fortune (nothing, but sheer dumb luck) would have it, I ended up with gallery representation in time to have one blockbuster (for me) year before the market crashed. So now what? To have come so far after nearly chucking the whole enterprise in favor of job security and a small check in my old age (if there's anything left of Social Security): WTF?
Do I start giving it all away? What about the 60" x 90" paintings? Who has room for all this crap? The materialness of it all is suffocating. But painting is material. More later when my thoughts cohere.
Posts
