The reviews were lavish. Gallery owners swooned at the thought of hanging just one of her paintings. She was Picasso without the blues, Van Gogh with both ears. She was Frieda flat on her back without the dark shadow of Rivera looming over her bed.
Her art sold so well she began to suspect something was wrong. Maybe she hadn’t suffered sufficiently. Maybe she’d rushed through her experimental phase and produced no embarrassing body of early work.
Sadly, as an artist she was just too good.
Far, far away from earth, on a tiny planet called her brain, the artist picked up a paintbrush with her left hand while holding a cup of coffee in her right. A dollop of hot coffee splashed onto her wrist. She winced, but at the same instant a glob of cool, blue paint pooled on the back of her other hand.
The school of Unnaturalism was born.
Its main tenet held that any idiot could be trained to paint with the hand that felt natural. Order, discipline, knowledge, and technique rule through that hand. But the
opposite hand is even more powerful, for it contains everything that’s hidden and unexpressed. By duct-taping her paintbrush to her left wrist (the hand, she claimed, wasn’t strong enough to grip the brush on its own), the school’s founding mother produced work that only vaguely reminded critics of her former paintings, as if her masterpieces had been copied by a six-year-old.
Unnaturalism attracted immediate followers. A few artists faked awkwardness by painting badly with their good hands, but their talent showed through. One ambidextrous watercolorist had almost given up trying to be a part of the new school when he discovered the practice of duct-taping his brush to one – really, either – of his feet. A reviewer whimsically mused that “the boy had finally managed to get his foot in the door.”
Not until a lecherous old fart who dabbled in acrylics decided that sexual energy could be better expressed by taping a brush to his penis did the movement of Unnaturalism lose purchase with critics. The public was actually afraid to turn out to view his openings.
The movement had come full circle in just one year. But art is like that, a passionate attempt to hold a vision perfectly still and to render it faithfully without arousing suspicion.
