Mark's Pages

April 23, 2004:

When I was a child she gave away the first successful work of art that I ever made.

It was a photo of the little neighbor girl, Vickie, looking up at me from leaf-strewn ground, while I sat in tree branches high overhead. It was intentionally modelled on the Beatles' Rubber Soul album cover. I was eight, and it was lovely.

She gave the print, and the negative, to the girl's parents. As I recall the story, they promised to return the negative, but didn't. She never contacted them to ask for it back. She was too embarrassed, or too passive. Or perhaps too unconsciously opposed to my strong and strongly-manifesting interest in art as vocation. Whatever the explanation, it was my first experience of disloyalty from a trusted person. While none has ever been pleasant, this one still stings now almost as it stung then.

Thirty-five years later she sent me a present: a new enlargement of the image, or so she believed. In fact it was an outtake from the same session: Vickie has her eyes closed and her mouth open, while in the correct one she has her eyes open and her mouth closed. It meant so much to her to rectify this ancient guilt that I didn't have the heart to tell her of her mistake.