Framed-art tour, exhibit 3

 

Boy oh, those beady eyes.

Pat doesn’t sign her work when she’s copying other artists’ renderings. The signed paintings had to come straight from her brain. But do I care? From wherever sprang her birds, these I begged for, she’s who dipped the brush, muddled the pigment, dabbed it on. Also their strut is the right amount of spindly gawkiness.

There’s just enough smear and disarray here—chaos—to satisfy my standards of [im]perfection. Watercolor demands disorder.

Beady, too, is good—glittering, greedy, discriminating. Or anyhow, when it’s chickens we’re talking about. The biddies I know, my husband’s, are constantly scrounging, peeling their eyes for their garbage. They reject the banana peels and citrus rinds, pointedly, but other than that, dear God. They’re cannibals. The bones and skin from the chicken soups I make from their Perdue relatives go whizzing down their crops.

The human eye—its sharp, minuscule pupil and teensy orb of vitreous humor—seems a more sophisticated affair. Due to the neural network, the import in what’s sighted is wildly expanded, often troublingly. Our greed leads to havoc and ruin. Eyes gleaming with desire and habitually roving, eager to pinpoint what next to grab, we don’t merely nibble on the scraps. Whatever it is a person sees as treasure worth snagging, don’t underestimate the beadiness.