Against the slate-blue patterned wallpaper the hepaticas were colorless. The spot Mrs. Brush chose was faded when she had taken down the tinted photograph of a leafy lane. She cocked her head at connoisseur angle.
"I should have this room repapered."
Clem hugged her in a burst of affection. She had liberated him from the gloomy thoughts the parlor had produced.
"So you think your son is an artist," he joshed. "I'll reframe it if you want to hang it here. And Ma, do me a favor, take down that thing I painted in high school."
"Oh Clem, it's real pretty. Let me enjoy those flowers before you take them away."
The effect of the painting of hepaticas on the neighbors was immediately and gratifyingly apparent. At the grocer's Mrs. Brush with transparent casualness mentioned that her son had made her a painting for May Day. This led naturally to invitations for afternoon coffee when neighbors expressed interest in seeing the hand-painted picture. Though the painting was not as large as her prideful tone had led them to anticipate, nonetheless they were impressed with the delicate contours and veins admirably reproduced by hand, almost as real as a photo, and more than one neighbor suggested to a daughter that she paint some pretty flowers to hang in the parlor. Clem too noticed the difference in the greetings of the matrons and young ladies of Pawnee Street.
"That's a real pretty picture you painted for your Ma, Clem. I wouldn't mind having one like that myself," hinted Mrs. Baumbach.
At first, he was inclined to view these compliments as droll commentary on local taste but, thinking about it, he concluded it was no crime to use subject-matter representationally if the presentation was modern. It was no sin to give enjoyment. People liked things they recognized. Look at Breughel, and now the vogue of Rousseau. If primitive French painting was O.K., why not primitive American? How about painting recognizable local scenes in flat simple forms? Perhaps off-perspective, perhaps not.
For example, the grey wooden church, a box with a cone on top. A cornfield under an El Greco storm cloud. Or a low surrealist horizon with a tin lizzie disappearing along a dusty prairie road. And on the horizon of his mental picture stood the inevitable distant red barn, strategically placed. The more he thought about it the more valid his hunch about an indigenous American art seemed. To hell
