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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Before it was moved out near the fairgrounds, the North Carolina Museum of Art was located in downtown Raleigh, and often, when we were young, my sister Gretchen and I would cut out of church and spend an hour looking at the paintings. The collection was not magnificent, but it was enough to give you a general overview, and to remind you that you pretty much sucked. Both Gretchen and I thought of ourselves as artists--she the kind that could actually draw and paint, and me the kind that pretended I could actually draw and paint. When my sister looked at a picture, she would stand at a distance, and then slowly, almost imperceptibly, drift forward, until her nose was right up against the canvas. She examined all of the painting, and then parts of it, her fingers dabbing in sympathy as she studied the brushstrokes.
"What are you thinking about?" I once asked.
And she said, "Oh, you know, the composition, the surfaces, the way things look realistic when you're far away but weird when you're up close."
"Me, too," I said, but what I was really thinking was how grand it would be to own a legitimate piece of art and display it in my bedroom. Even with my babysitting income, paintings were out of the question, so instead I invested in postcards, which could be bought for a quarter in the museum shop and matted with shirt cardboard. This made them look more presentable.
I was looking for framing ideas one afternoon when I wandered into a little art gallery called the Little Art Gallery. It was a relatively new place, located in the North Hills Mall and owned by a woman named Ruth, who was around my mom's age, and introduced me to the word "fabulous," as in: "If you're interested, I've got a fabulous new Matisse that just came in yesterday."
This was a poster rather than a painting, but still I regarded it the way I thought a connoisseur might, removing my glasses and sucking on the stem as I tilted my head. "I'm just not sure how it will fit in with the rest of my collection," I said, meaning my Gustav Klimt calendar and the cover of the King Crimson LP tacked above my dresser.
Ruth treated me like an adult, which must have been a task, given the way I carried on. "I don't know if you realize it," I once told her, "but it seems that Picasso is actually Spanish."
"Is he?" she said.
"I had a few of his postcards on my French wall, the one where my desk is, but now I've moved them next to my bed, beside the Miro."
She closed her eyes, pretending to imagine this new configuration.
"Good move," she said.
The art gallery was not far from my junior high, and I used to stop by after class and hang out. Hours later I'd return home,...
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