wooden boat: Lars Trodson, "The Roads to Providence"
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Fake vs. Real
Lars Trodson archives
I have this phenomenally awful rendering of Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” in my office at home. I got it at a yard sale for a buck. It’s garish and lifeless and some of the hands on the apostles look more like baseball gloves than anything a human being would have attached to their wrists.
This is an old reproduction – I’m guessing from the ‘40s or ‘50s, judging by some of the stickers on the back of the matting. But it was actually framed with some care; it’s printed on nice solid material and the frame surrounding the painting really isn’t bad.
I am almost certain these affordable reproductions were sold by the thousands and adorned the homes of people all across this country – the pious first-generation Americans who wanted to recognize their faith. So there’s a weird duality to this piece of mass art; yes, it’s a pretty terrible attempt to replicate the majesty of Da Vinci, but also, at the same time, the art really wasn’t the point. It was undoubtedly looked at as a religious icon, and was meant to reflect the theological sensibilities of the inhabitants of the house rather than their taste in fine art.
So I keep it around because of that. It’s an artifact from another time and place; a modest icon that serves the same purpose for me as it did for the people who bought this mass-produced painting a long time ago.
In another corner of the office there is a reproduction of a Winslow Homer painting. In the center of the canvas is a wooden boat, the oars of which are being pulled by fisherman in silhouette. He’s got two big fish in the boat, and the fisherman is in profile, he’s looking over his shoulder. The sea has gone bad, he’s pulling his little boat over the chop, and he’s looking at the dark, spiky clouds lined up on the horizon and also at the sails of a much larger boat. This boat, he is no doubt thinking, may be able to take him in so he can ride out the coming storm and save his catch.
It is a lonely, melancholy painting; full of emotion and, even though it is a reproduction, you can see Homer’s rightfully famous approach to painting water and its mercurial properties. Within the frame are the elements of fear, hope, faith, daily life, chance and uncertainty.
To the right of that painting is another cheap reproduction of a painting clearly inspired by Homer. A fisherman is in a small
wooden boat, pulling on his oars through a choppy sea. He has no fish in the boat but rather a small basket, a creel, perhaps, and he’s looking over his shoulder (in the opposite direction of Homer) and in the background is not a solitary ship but rather a lighthouse on a small island. Same content, same theme, utterly different effect.
The painting is bright and almost cheery. It looks like an inexpensive Christmas card. The spray hitting the shoals behind the fisherman looks like a couple of cotton balls stacked on top of one another, and as it sits next to the Homer painting it is very easy to see the difference between art and artifice. It almost makes you feel bad for the artist of the lesser painting, you wondered why he even bothered.
The artists bothered, of course, because they were both interested in the process, they were both interested in what they could achieve and uncover. Homer, like almost any other artist, may have been bemused by his own promethean talent. You can see him looking at the results of his latest work and thinking, “How do I do it?”
The other guy, well, he may have been like a lot of other artists – a little delusional over his own lack of talent, frustrated over his lack of recognition. Or, he may have been so proud he was able to render anything resembling real life at all that he was inordinately proud of what he could accomplish.
It isn’t really fair to hang the guy next to Homer, but it reminds me of how fine a line it is between inspiration and ability; between artistic success and failure. But that is purely on an aesthetic level.
Each of these odd things brings me their own distinct pleasure. I look at them and wonder about why anyone went to the trouble of reproducing these paintings in the first place – and in the case of the Da Vinci painting it’s not only a reproduction but of course a fake. Somebody had a copy of the Da Vinci painting and was hired to reproduce it for a mass audience. You have to wonder what was going through that artist’s mind.
But they’ve been in my office for a long time now, and once in a while – along with my American flag that hangs right next to an old print of the Norman Rockwell painting “Freedom From Fear” – I look at them and smile, and find new details in each that I hadn’t really seen before. I often wonder what the name of the painting is of the fisherman headed toward the lighthouse, because there is no marker or sticker to tell me. I’ve never looked up the name of the Homer painting because it is oddly irrelevant to me; it has its own meaning for me.
I bring this up because these strange things are helping to train me look at the world.
I have been dismayed, like a lot of people, at the cutting up of my New England landscape with these anonymous-looking houses, and these mass productions of bank branches and chain stores, and the appearance for more “Land for Sale” signs that surely means fewer trees and blocked streams and less square footage of the messy natural terrain.
But just as in my little copies, surely of which there must have been thousands and thousands made, just like the banks and the homes we seen being built right before our eyes, I am trying very hard not to see what is the same, but rather what is unique and different.
Lars Trodson can be reached at larstrodson@comcast.net
