Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
It wasn’t that Nadine MacHilltop, curator of the Black Dot Museum of Political Art, didn’t like Hockney. She did. And she adored Diebenkorn. Paintings didn’t need to be happy, literal or realistic to be good. They didn’t have hidden pictures, they weren’t invitations to enter magical worlds, and they didn’t tell a story. Nadine stood up and walked over to the storage unit in the same way she’d gone to the diner, full of curiosity, but ready to be disappointed.
Starting on the top, she decided to move across the three tiers of shelves, left to right and leave the paintings she might want to include in an exhibition extending over the ledge. She pulled the first painting part way out, just to get an idea. What she saw prompted her to take it out and set it on one of the easels. It was pretty clear why Martin’s various businesses had failed. Landscaping, tool sharpening, mobile art gallery and whatever else he hadn’t told her about. He had failed at these things because he was a painter.
The first painting she pulled out was as good, if not better, than the one Martin had brought into the museum, thought Nadine. Knowing how the painting had been approached was extremely helpful, but not essential, to seeing its quality. Although, there was no doubting the integrity of the piece and that’s what she had feared—that Martin, having decided to alter the paintings, had degraded them or destroyed them. That she’d be standing there seeing what he’d done as defacing them.
She wasn’t sure they were political, but right now that was secondary to the thrill of recognizing that Martin was a damn good painter. For however much of an act he put on for the world, he had remained true to himself in revealing himself to be a narcissist.
Deciding to leave the first painting on the easel as “hard to top” regardless of what she saw next, Nadine pulled the second painting part way out and said, “I think I’m going to need a lot more easels.”
