The Story of "Heart Bursts"!

I decided to create a painting for Alan, for Christmas. A large one. It would, I figured, go perfectly in the sienna red livingroom of his bungalow on the water across from Mt. Ranier and he would, I figured, fall in love with it, immediately. I found a large canvass so big I could barely lug it around, wrestled it up onto the island in the center of my kitchen, bought acrylics and then more acrylics and then more acrylics, and went to work.

I had made a painting before, in 1973. It was a charming and sedate little thing, the subject being a room where Jim, Kelly, Erin and Kevin and I lived at 1706, Wheaton Way. We called the room "The Diamond Room", perhaps because of the old wall-to-wall diamond-patterned mauve colored rug on the floor. That room held the same table which now lives in my Bainbridge townhouse (but the table has since been stressed, as they say, ever since I took a knife and then a hammer to it immediately after Jim died, so now it has what is called a chic appearance), but never mind that, the picture has, as I said and as others have also said, great charm, but it is a realistic painting and I wanted my Alan-picture to be an abstract, a large colorful abstract, to match the feel and the tenure and the trill (??!!) of his marvelously painted bungalow.

Alan is a man of vibrant tastes and colors.

So I began. I took a huge brush and colored the canvas with sea-green, reds, white, yellow, orange....and then, having down that, stood back and stared at what I'd done. Had I had a beard on my chin, I would have stood there and stroked it for an hour or two. Because, really, with all that color, I had come up with exactly.....nothing. Nothing! A lot of color, true, but.....why? And for what reason? So, now I knew something. Creating an abstract painting is not, in any way, as easy as it looks. Of course. Well, any fool knows that. Even I could have told me that.

Except.....I thought somehow it would be easy. Because, I think I thought, I know Alan, I know his colors, and if I simply put his colors to the canvas, it will come out ..... so I painted a huge red heart in the center of the canvas. A long huge semi-droopy red heart. And then I began paying attention to the edges of the heart, collaging in three paper fortunes from fortune cookies, painting lines of back dots here and there (when in doubt, dot, which used to be one of my mottos, although for the life of me I can not now remember what it was a motto for.....) - -

Anyway, I finally got the painting to a place where I called it done, a great big red droopy heart with some fairly interesting edges and corners outside of the heart, and the word "I love you" in French, "J'Taime", in the lower left hand corner, and I left my name entirely out of it, because I wanted the painting to be a surprise.

Because the deal was, I was going to hang it in my home and, when Alan came by for Christmas, there it would be. My brand new painting, which I had somehow...procured....and he would take one look and exclaim, "Oh, my God! Sweetheart! Whereever did you get this fabulous, fabulous painting! I love it! Did you buy it here on the island? Did one of your artist friends paint it? How much did it cost????"

And I would look shyly down at the floor, and then look up at him, and maybe I'd tug a bit at one of my curls as I smiled a little shyly at him and then say softly, "I painted it, Alan, I painted it for you."

Pow! Wow! Huzza! Jazz Hands! The music swells. He takes her in his arms. Her eyelids flutter. He kisses her forehead and then her lips. He cannot BELIEVE his good fortune, all this......and she's an artist, as well!!!!!!

Not.

The Friday before Christmas arrived and the picture was hung. My last patient of the day left and my stomach was leaping about with anticipation and nervousness. It was a set-up, I knew that. I knew the risks. And yet....how could I miss? It was a heart, right? A BIG heart, right? And his favorite colors were pretty much frisking their way around the heart, right? And I painted it with love, pure unmitigated love, right? How could it miss?

He came up the stairs, as always, handed me a bouquet of flowers (as he often does, sweet guy that he is), dropped his bag as always, kissed me (this is not necessarily in order, but he did all this) walked through the livingroom and went upstairs to change. Okay, so he didn't notice it. No big deal. The human brain is not capable of taking in everything at once, give it a little time, after all, he's just driven for two hours, he stopped for flowers, maybe gas as well, he probably listened to the radio, maybe there was some anger-provoking thing on the radio news, there usually is, and he was excited about seeing me, we are always so glad to see each other, I'm the priority here, not what's on my walls..........

...........an hour later, right after I brought him his drink of gin and Hendricks, I saunter over to the painting on the wall and say, "Look what I bought at the outdoor art sale! I only paid five hundred for it!"

He looked. "Terrible frame," he said, taking a second sip of his drink.

My heart. My brain. My face. My tremor. My breathe. That stupid goddamned painting. Very very very very very much unlike me, I decided to let it go. I didn't say another thing. I mean, about the painting. Not that night. Otherwise I knew I would suddenly find myself in that place where you think you are watching a horror movie about a couple who are screaming at each other and you happen to be the female star.

The next morning, right before Alan went up to take his shower I said, "If you were the artist of this painting, what would you do to make it better?"

And he walked his tall frame over to the painting, stood there for a moment, said, "More yellow." Then he turned, went upstairs, and took his shower.

Whereupon I ran to the cupboard, got out the yellow tube of acyrlic, spurted a whole big gob of acyrlic onto the painting right while the painting was still hanging on the wall, took two paintbrushes, one in each hand, and went at it. Not in a graffiti-kind-of-way, but in an I-am-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown-but-I'm-still-inside-the-game sort of way. So that, when Alan came down, all clean and glistening from his shower, still towel drying HIS THINNING HAIR (caps are mine), his eyes lit on the painting....and then he looked at me.....and then he looked at the painting....and then he looked at me.....and then he looked at the painting...and then he looked at me....and then he said, "Oh, Baby, baby, baby, did you paint this?"

"arhgheldiejhaflghudgeraghelpdkkvcarjhg."

"Oh, my God, Kay, how awful you must have felt," he said, "I am so sorry."

Well, that just made it worse.

"Alan, it was a set-up," I said. "It was a terrible set-up. I'm a big girl" (note: ha!) "I never should have showed you the painting in that way, I will take it down to my office and work on it some more later, don't you worry, hey, listen, we're going to Seattle for Christmas, we're going to have a great time, let's not even THINK about this, let's not even SAY ONE MORE WORD about any of this, let's forget ALL ABOUT THE SILLY PAINTING, c'mon, it doesn't matter to me in the SLIGHEST, not one eensy weensy bit....."

.....and, after me going on like this for maybe twenty-five more minutes, we were able to lay the big droopy red heart to rest and not let it get to us anymore. I put it in my office. One of my patients said the top of the painting, which is all she could see from her perspective, reminded her of a pair of balls. Another patient said it reminded her of a big purple butt.

Three weeks later, I dragged the painting up again (Alan had already removed the thin black frame from the thing), lugged it up onto the kitchen island, and covered it with more paint. I walked down to Paper Products, bought some very expensive thick yellow paper, more acrylics, some high gloss stuff and some Elmer's glue. Because I simply could not remove my Self from the theme of hearts, I tore what seemed like hundreds of big hearts and little hearts out of the thick yellow paper and glued them onto the newly painted canvas. I went upstairs, found my old sewing basket. brought back down a spool of red thread, and glued red thread onto each heart, making the thread to look like veins. I covered each yellow- heart-with-red-veins with thick layers of Elmer's glue, allowed it all time to dry, sprayed the whole thing with high gloss, and this time, signed my name to the right hand bottom of the painting, which by now had become a collage.

I hung it right back up where it had been before. I liked it. I liked it so much I decided to keep it. I called it "Heartbursts". It looked perfect in my place. It fit this place to a tee. No wow needed, no pow needed, no jazz hands need apply. I had done it. I had pleased myself. I had shoved something to the point of absolute destruction and I had brought it back again.

And I was satisfied.

The next time it was Alan's turn to come to my place [our place], we now call it, he spotted the college immediately.

"Baby, that's wonderful! I love it! It'll look so great in my place! I can't wait to hang it! I'll take down the Amy Burnett and put this where the Burnett has been. Sweetheart, you're a genuis!"

Me: "This is MY painting. The other one was your's. THIS is mine."

Alan: {Laughing} "Come on, Kay, don't. Don't be that way. I LOVE this. If I saw this in a shop, I'd buy it. I couldn't even walk BY this painting on the street without stopping and entering the store. I'm not kidding, Sweetheart, I LOVE this. I love this. It's mine."

Me: "Actually, It's mine. I love it. It looks great here. I made it with you in my heart, Alan, but it's big and warm and cozy and .....really, I don't think I want to part with it. Actually."

So we went back and forth like this, for a few days. And then we made a bet on something, I don't remember what. Anyway, I lost the bet and he won the painting. He let me keep it for a month or so and just today, he drove it back to his fabulous little bungalow.

It's probably hung up by now. It's probably missing me. It's probably got a hang up.

So. Magge, who was the proprietor of the most excellent RAVEN'S BLUES in Poulsbo and HEARTS AND HANDS in Sante Fe, pronounced my painting/collage "wonderful" and Magge would never lie about such things, she has too much German pride in her to lie. And Reba Renner, who also saw my painting, called it "fabulous". And that was before she even knew I wa

s the artist! Because I have a high-satisfaction-level bu totherwise, little ego-involvement in this type of thing, I feel free in expressing my own opinion, which is this: if one plays around and around and around, with paint or words or whatever it is one is playing with, sooner or later you are going to end up pleasing yourself in some way or another {even if it's just by stopping}and if what you create pleases others in the process, well, you get to say nice things about whatever you've created if you choose to do so.

I will almost end with a rather oblique quote from one of my most favorite writers, the amazing Gertrude Stein from her such-a-great book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas:

"Well, what did you think of what you saw, asked Miss Stein. When you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that do it after you, they don't have to worry about making it anymore and they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when the others make it. This was a time when our walls were hung with Picasso, Renoir, Cezanne, two Gauguins, Valloton, Maurice Denis, a little Daumier, a moderate sized Greco, a Toulouse-Lautrec - and at that time these pictures had no value and there was no social privilege attached to knowing any one there, only those came who really were interested. So as I say anybody could come in. However, there was the forula. It was a mere form, really everybody could come in, but the usual formula was, de la part de qui venez-vous, who is your introducer. And Miss Stein would open the door with that, who is your introducer and the voice must answer with the name of the somebody who had told them about this place."

How charming Stein's book is, how charming to read it for the fourth time and most especially at this time in my life, after seeing Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, and, of course, after meeting Alan, who loves art way more than I do, I mean the kind of art that is the "painting kind", and how glad I am, therefore, that I was able to come up with something that he values, by which I mean "Heartbursts," which Alan actually brings up to people and brags about and, may I say, looks way better in the person than it looks in the picture at the beginning of this blog.