Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

The topic of art came up on a long discussion thread at Sarah Hoyt’s blog the other day, when another commenter posted a YouTube video explaining why the late painter Thomas Kinkade was at once so despised by art world professionals and yet so very popular among people who bought the prints of his paintings. I posted my own opinion, when the thread made a side turn into a discussion of what ordinary people chose to put on their walls to contemplate daily – and that was that Kinkade painted pictures that were popular with the consuming public and that he made a mint at doing so, commercially. This is apparently not the point of art, according to the professional art world. Art with a capital A ought to challenge, mystify, or discombobulate the public, and either the filthy rich or the government ought to pay for it … not the uneducated and unappreciative rubes who merely fork out their tax dollars for public art which looks like bronze or cement turds, an engorged lower colon, a pile of scrap metal or an overweight woman about to throw a performative tantrum in a fast-food establishment.

So – goopy painted landscapes of gardens, thatched cottages, lighthouses by the ocean, pretty churches with light shining out of stained glass windows, and misty cityscapes adorned with little flecks of suspiciously fluorescent paint are just … too crassly contemptable for words in the eyes of critics who think a banana duct-taped to a wall and the  artists unnamed bed are just the ticket to fame and fortune in the official art world. That Thomas Kinkade made a bomb of money appealing to the masses is an unbearable insult to the Capital A-art crowd.

It’s just that most of us really don’t care to play the multi-million-dollar Capital-A-art money-laundering game. We don’t buy something to put on the wall to impress our friends with having spent a bomb on something that we suspect is just part of a scam, anyway. We don’t want to be challenged, or baffled or lectured every time we look at the stuff on our walls: we’d much rather have something pleasant, comforting, or even inspiring to look at. The commenters who participated in that side-thread all had things that they liked on the walls of their personal space: paintings and drawings inherited from artistic family members, things they had done themselves, or purchased from local artists they liked. I have a collection of prints that I bought as an impoverished junior airman in Japan; prints by a mildly renown mid-century artist, Toshi Yoshida. I loved them for the colors, and the traditional look of the scenes that he did: gardens, landscapes, city scenes. All very restful, and to me, aesthetically pleasing. I bought most of them unframed and at a bare-bones price, from a vendor who appeared from Tokyo once a month at the bazaar sponsored by the wives’ clubs. I did splurge and bought two of them framed – views of mountain country, covered in snow, with tree-branches piled in fluffy white, and pale blue shadows reflecting just what a snowy countryside looked like to me. Later, after I had spent a year in Greenland, I brought the unframed ones to a local art-framer that Mom knew, and we picked out individual mats for each and framed them all in museum-quality glass and simple wood frames. I am still not tired of looking at them. Should the house ever catch fire, after Wee Jamie, my daughter and the cats, if I had time enough for rescuing anything else, I would grab my Yoshida prints.

Just a few months ago, I began going back to a hobby that I pursued from high school on to a point when I had a real, full-size house to play with – that is, miniature interiors and structures, I had subscriptions to all the good hobbyist magazines, frequented conventions as often as I could, really spent more than I probably could afford on the good stuff, and my family knew what to get for me, for birthdays and Christmas. Great-Aunt Nan was especially good at this, after I provided her with some print catalogues with the items that I really, really, really desired all circled. (With exclamation points!) Anyway – it was really quite mentally satisfying, constructing tiny environments out of this and that, but the interest faded when I had a for-real, for-permanent house and garden to play with.

Until I found some interesting kits on Amazon last year, and was offered some of the nicer, more detailed ones through the Vine program, and suddenly, I was interested again. The latest, which just arrived today, is a half-inch-to-a-foot scale Japanese sushi restaurant – a basic little building, with all the banners, flags, display cabinets and all … and about eighty tiny individual dishes of various sushi and noodle bowls to contrive and display – just like in such real Japanese restaurants, where the sample dishes were artfully made from plastic and on display in the windows, with the price next to each. It used to be very easy to meal-shop in ordinary Japanese restaurants; if the menu was impenetrable, you just went to the window with the waitress and pointed to whichever dish looked good. And with the realistic degree that such items were made – it was very easy to figure out what you would like to eat, since it would come out from the kitchen looking exactly like it did in the display. (more information here, about this interesting and useful Japanese restaurant custom.)

The instruction booklet – the actual building is 6.5 inches wide, by 5 deep.

The first page of instructions for making the tiny sushi – the two platters are about the size of a dime.

So, I’ve been a Vine reviewer for a number of years – a situation which has paid off rather handily for us, especially when it came to baby items for Wee Jamie. I have no idea how this came about, in case anyone wonders how I fell into this sweet, sweet gig, other than a lot of Amazon shoppers about ten years ago marked down my reviews of books and movies as being very helpful. Something tripped the magic algorithm, and hey, presto – I got an invite. I do have to pay tax on the estimated value of the items that I ask for, and write a review on them … but on the whole, it’s been quite handy. I’m not totally mercenary, though – I don’t routinely ask for high-value items which can be resold, which I understand that some reviewers have made out very well in doing so. I only ask for items which I can use in the household.

This is by way of saying that we have frequent Amazon deliveries. Last night we had a delivery so late that we had all gone to bed by the time that the delivery was made. This morning, my daughter retrieved the packages when she came back from her early-morning marathon run – and there were three of them, instead of the expected two.

Huh … well, maybe I had asked for the cat water fountain with the filters that purify the recycled water. My name was on the package label, so it wasn’t a mistake and meant for someone else. But I had never asked for it, or purchased one, and there was no notation of it being a gift from anyone else. It’s a mystery. Although it could be a glitch in the Vine product queue system, there is another possible explanation – that one of our cats accessed my computer, and ordered it, like Ivan the cat in this book: Ivan the very clever cat who has his own cellphone and media account.

We suspect Miso, or perhaps Persephone. Although it is not entirely out of the question that Sarah Hoyt’s Indy managed to order it for his mother and odd-eyed fluffy white brother, Prince.