The artist

When his father died, he found a piece of paper with a note scratched through the fog of his dad’s final days. His father had drawn a simple star and written, “I can’t believe I’ve gone this far.”

Being an artist, he knew what to do. He wrote above the scrawl “dad’s poem” and framed copies for his siblings.

He always knew what to do with things that others might easily discard. It’s like he saw the mountains and valleys of life through a prism, one tinted in color and shape and meaning. Anytime he took a paint brush in hand, the prism appeared. Life distorted turned into beauty materialized.

The artist had been born in a dusty town in south Texas. His father’s furniture store had run on hard times so the family moved to Little Rock. He reveled in being the new kid, and being the middle child in a large family prepared him to make friends and to excel.

In junior high, he met a girl from a good family with an old Arkansas name. She was popular and he was the new boy from Texas. Still, he worked to catch her eye. He tried to impress her, catching passes from his older brother in football games and looking for her in the crowd when he scored touchdowns. A simple hayride led to dating, which turned into marriage and raising a family.

At the age of 21, the artist learned his wife was pregnant with their first child. He also learned that he had drawn a low draft number, 42, the same as his high school football number. He didn’t want to leave his new family, but he didn’t want to avoid his duty either. So he volunteered.

Soon he shipped off to Vietnam to work as a mechanic on a helicopter base. While there, he was wounded. His spirit remained unscathed.

The artist fulfilled his tour of duty and came home to a baby girl. Soon, another daughter would follow, but her heart would fail her, causing his own to break. He had rocked his baby girl back and forth, back and forth every night, listening to her breathe, until one day, he had to let her go. Surgery had failed. She would not wake up again.

The artist painted through his tears, holding them back to keep his wife and first-born feeling safe and whole. He finished college, then went to work at the family business. A son came along a couple of years later. The artist painted, that unique prism again showing patterns of life that don’t look real, until they suddenly do.

Then, one can’t help but see that he depicted life better than it was, by changing the angles just a bit, by adding more color, by including shadows as a reminder of those who are gone, their imprints reflecting the darkness of absence.

The artist started a sandwich shop downtown, and used the shop’s walls as a gallery for other artists. It was an endeavor before its time. He went to work for the Veterans Administration, enjoying the people but loathing the bureaucracy. Using the GI Bill, he studied for a master’s degree in fine arts, achieving it much later than his classmates, who tended to be much younger. He could match their optimism, but stood out because he was a family man.

One class required an outing to the White River near Calico Rock. He fell in love with the constant motion of rivers there and found they reflected the ever-moving currents of his life. His paintings moved too. The shadows remained and he added a new symbol to many: a simple egg. The beginning of life.

One day, his teenage daughter came home from school to find a bonfire in the backyard. The artist had decided to give himself a clean slate, to start over, and he burned a large number of his works to do so.

He had toyed with sculptures, too. Knowing they wouldn’t ignite, he did a quick tour of downtown Little Rock, dropping them in backyards with low fences. If you lived in the Quapaw Quarter in the early 1980s and found an intriguing sculpture in your yard one day, that was because the artist decided to begin again.

Later, grandchildren came along, and he insisted that Grandfather was too common a term for him, so he required, tongue-in-cheek, they call him by the French Grande Pere. They shortened it to just Pere. His motherin-law mentioned more than once the name matched his shape.

All the while, he painted and drew, sketched and doodled.

One day, after retirement from the VA, he went to the doctor for a checkup, and his blood work showed an anomaly. He was sick and didn’t know it. Treatments meant that he’d have no energy and could barely pick up a paint brush at times.

He marshalled his spirit for his family. After months of trying, he realized the treatments only delayed the inevitable and were robbing him of important conversations to be had. He stopped the treatments and ordered his son-in-law and two grandchildren to spring him from the hospital. They did.

The artist spent the next few days visiting. He insisted the grandkids watch “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” with him. He ordered Frostys from Wendy’s. He talked about fishing and narrated important stories in his life. Then, as the fog of his disease descended, he sat down and wrote each of his children and grandchildren a note.

One note read, “Into the future, whatever that may mean.”

Some might think it an odd thing to write. But those who knew his art, knew the prism in which he viewed the world, got it. Those who understood how he found competing beauty in color and shadows allowed themselves to recognize. They were seeing the artist at work.

He had continued his “dad’s poem.”