Hire An Anonymous Bosch

Someone recently took a look at the bare walls of my pauper's condo and told me that I needed some artwork. So I have decided to have my daughter provide the artwork. I bought her real acrylic paints and real paint brushes yesterday. We laid out a table (outside, she insisted, to get 'inspired'). She then asked for some help getting started. She wanted to see some pictures of flowers and so I dug up a stack of old Horizon periodicals that I once bought at a used book sale for a buck a piece. The periodicals are hardcover and worth every penny. These things are out of print unfortunately (remember what I wrote about out of print things--I'm going out of print soon, too). They are wonderfully written (I have a fantastic piece on the Battle of the Somme) and have color plates in all of them depicting some famous piece of historical artwork along with a article about it. Well, as luck would have it, the only thing I had for my daughter to get ideas from were the works of Hieronymus Bosch and Andrea Mantegna. She flipped the pages making scowls. She stopped at Mantegna's Saint Sebastian and asked me what that was all about (I said that's how a marathon or any treadmill 'workout' feels); she then turned to his Lamentation over a Dead Christ and said that she'd seen enough. She said basically in gentle 8 year-old-speak that this exercise in inspiration that I had put her through was a fucking disaster. (My f-bomb--she didn't use that word and never will as a child, but she did use the word 'disaster' which is ok to use around my house.) She wondered where the flowers were in these grim paintings and I told her that they came along later, when the French arrived on the scene, drinking their wine and living their grand little lives, not thinking too much about Catholic guilt and martyrish sufferings, fixated instead on the pleasures of the flesh and the eye. I then said that I didn't have any of those books. So we went outside and she drew a picture of a giant eagle for me; she likes eagles but hopefully not the Eaglez. She charged me 25 cents for the drawing.