Life in Acrylic and Oils

“What [is] any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself – life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.”

~ Willa Cather

For those of my readers who tend to notice the buried detail, you probably have spotted the subtitle I gave my blog. The rationale behind this subtitlery was not that I believed when I named it that “Movie Musings” could not stand on its own, nor was it a mere fling with poetic license. Rather this dabbling in mild excess stands behind two purposes. The first is that it excuses me on occasion to stray slightly from my primary topic with no need to explain my decision to do so. The other is to act, like Carol Burnett’s tug-of-the-ear, as a very subtle acknowledgement to someone who has affected me throughout my life, and imbued many of my undertakings with encouragement and inspiration.

On September 30, 1995, my grandfather gave me a gift. A book of children’s short stories entitled Round About Rambles. The book had belonged to him ever since he was a child and, based on a Christmas inscription to a Charles Wilder dated 1874, had been in my family for more than a hundred and twenty years. Below this inscription, my grandfather added one of his own:

To Paul Bedlan Wilder

from Carlton Bedlan Wilder

No words of inspiration. No perfect quotation or brief anecdote. Just our two names and the date. And yet with the inclusion of our shared middle name, he let me know better than any cleverly chosen words ever could that the two of us are linked. I gave this book a special shelf above my desk at home, where I sit writing this right now, and each time I look up from my computer screen and see it, I am reminded of who I am and of where I came from. And now I hope he, and you my readers, will permit me one of my own round about rambles.

Once when I was a child, ten or eleven (maybe older; maybe younger), Carl gave me an art lesson. You see, in my life, I have had the incomparable honor of being the grandson of a great artist. And early on, members in my family began to recognize, I suppose, that I had inherited a small fraction of his talent, which they frequently chose to tell me. So in an effort to catch his attention one day while visiting, I gathered together a drawing pad and some colored pencils, packed them into a small rowboat and anchored myself fifty yards offshore, where I began, for the next hour or so, to sketch the shoreline. It worked. A couple of days later my mom received a call from my grandmother that Carl had seen me sketching out in the river and was wondering if I’d be interested in a private art lesson.

For the next couple of weeks, on Sundays, my dad drove me to the “little lot” on Jack Wright Island Road, where, after a waffle breakfast, Carl and I would go off together and talk about art. I remember sitting out on the deck and being shown the way the color of a tree trunk changes as it curves around each side, represented in art by shadow and shading and variations in color tone. A few weeks into the lessons, Carl set up a second easel in his studio, and for the remainder of our time together as master and pupil, we stood side by side and painted. Every now and then, I would receive direction, but for the most part, we just painted.

The lessons ended after not too long a period of time. The story goes that Carl, after a hiatus from painting in order to work on the house he built for my grandmother and him to live in, caught the bug during our lessons and decided it was time to pick up the brush again. I guess I did a little inspiring of my own. Our friendship has far outlasted the time we spent in the studio together. But I have never forgotten what it feels like to paint beside a great artist like Carlton Wilder. And I never will.

Today, when I look at one of Carl’s paintings, my thoughts are immediately whisked away to some distant memory from my past. A poker game boisterously playing out late into the night. Or the sound the water makes as two wooden oars work in unison to propel a small rowboat across the St. Johns. Or the haunting flavors of a perfectly mixed Manhattan, sipped while watching the sun make its daily exit from the sky. People like to pontificate the defining boundaries of a qualified blessed life. Well consider this. My life has been illustrated by Carlton Wilder paintings.

Until next week, here’s my hope that we all find our Shangri-La. Good night.