fuck-up

A painting was found by the dumpster near our apartment. It was an amatuer painting of an eye, painted in greys and blacks with a name and date scribbled in the corner. This person had obviously not approved of their work, and left it by the dumpster for the garbageman to carry off. Yet, if they REALLY wanted it gone, perhaps they would have thrown it inside the dumpster instead of left it propped up against the side, noticable.

The painting found its way into my apartment and onto the counter. I looked at it for a while. Someone’s art. It DID sort of suck: no colors but black and two different shades of grey produced a set of triangles surrounding an eye, made of similar shapes, but done sloppy, without care or meaning, like they had to do it for their thirty thousand a year art class and didn’t want to. The next day they’d come into class empty handed and tell the professor that the assignment was “bullshit” and “why cant we just paint what we want?”.

I suppose you’ve got to respect someone for noticing a shitty attempt, and placing it in the garbage, even though it was propped up to see. A fuck-up.

Earlier in the evening I had borrowed the third roommate’s car to make a run to Target and purchase some paint, for my supply of paint that I had once assumed was perpetual had finally been exhausted. I am not a painter and the stuff I’ve painted in the past has been shitty and funny and full of nothing but I don’t care, cause I enjoy doing it from time to time. And so I thought it ironic that this painting had come into my hands on this night, this night when I had decided to forgo a petcoparty I had commited myself to in order to paint, cause I was feeling saucy.

So I sat on the living room floor with my new set of children’s paint and unrolled my brushes and decided to make the painting even worse than before. I added some blues and reds and yellows and smashed a brush all aroung the lines.

That grey eye someone created DID sort of suck. Yet, in their art they had prompted me to create something out of it also, to think about where it had come from and the messege they were trying to send, and perhaps my thoughts and curiosities that wrapped around that image for a certain amount of time turned it into great art.

I thought after I went over it with more colors and gave it a name, I should set it back up against the dumpster for someone to find. maybe the original owner or someone else who wonders why I’d throw my art away. Why you throw your art away is not a mystery though, you throw it away because it fucking sucks.