Explore a litte

Marla gave herself a small tour of the house. The old man had shown her where all the rooms were, but he had seemed to rush it along, as if he were in a hurry to get out of the house. Now she allowed herself to take in the antique furniture, the beautiful rugs and decorations, the classic ambience of the old home.

And the art! Marla had always been envious of people who could afford to purchase fine art for their homes; she had made do with frequent trips to the several museums in the city that displayed the works of old and modern masters. But the walls of this house put even some of those works to shame. In the entry, a large portrait, presumably a former master of the house, glowered down at her. While the expression on the face of the dark haired man detracted from his extraordinarily handsome features, Marla admired the technique of the artist who had captured the ruthless character of a man who, she imagined, must have flourished in the cutthroat world of nineteenth century industry.

Further down the hall, Marla discovered several landscapes, marvellously realistic depictions of pastoral scenes. In one, she noticed two tiny figures in the distance on the other side of a placid lake. The painting itself was quite large, with a forest surrounding the water and backed by majestic peaks in the far distance. The two figures were almost lost in the panorama, but Marla had a practiced eye for artistic detail. She examined the figures more closely, imagining the artist's hand moving over the canvas as he created this contrast between the immensity of nature and the minute individual.

But wait a moment! Marla put her face close to the canvas. The figures were obviously a man and a woman, from the clothes they wore. The figures were so small that Marla was hard pressed to tell for sure, but it appeared that the artist had represented the woman as dark-skinned, and the man as light. But surely the picture had to have been painted sometime before the Civil War! Could this artist have been trying to memorialize a tryst between two lovers whose relationship was taboo? Maybe that was why the figures were so small, so that no one would be able to tell what he had done. Perhaps the artist himself was the man in the painting, and the work was a tribute to a lover that he could never claim outwardly.

Marla laughed at her imagination as it ran away with her. The house was really putting her in a creative frame of mind. In fact, she thought, if I looked at the picture as a modern work, whose to say that the woman isn't the artist? After all, here I am, a black woman artist. Or at least I will be once I get to work.