story about an artist

In my twenties I worked at the front desk of the Queensland Art Gallery for a while. It is huge and immaculate and rather hushed. One day an old man came in, wizened and bent. He approached the island of our desk across the marble floor.

“This the art gallery?”

Yes, I said. His hands were trembling and his fingers seamed with dirt.

He had come down from the country on the bus: twelve hours. He set a bag down on the counter and began to open it very slowly. He said, “Got a painting for youse.”

He unrolled a canvas and showed it to me. The painting seemed to me pretty awful but his courage and his straightforward, honest presumption moved me to tears. He’s a Queenslander, this is his art, this is the Queensland Art Gallery – why shouldn’t he bring it in here and offer to hang it? It made sense.

I was too gauche to know how to deal with him and his imminent and crushing disappointment. I thought he might never have shown his work to anyone before. He had come all the way down here to make a fool out of himself – a noble, exemplary fool – and in doing so, he exposed the far greater foolishness of our urbanity, our conformity, our stupid ladders and pretentious mores. I saw all of this in an instant and it filled my sore heart with heat. I picked up the phone and called a kindly woman who worked in acquisitions, who had sometimes chatted with me in the lifts. I asked her to come down and see him. I hope she may have taken him out for coffee and talked with him about his work. I hope she encouraged him to paint more. I have often thought about this man and his simple human courage, his artist’s heart. He might be dead now and it’s possible his paintings may all have been thrown away.