A Work of Art

I feel that my blog needs some beauty today, so I’m posting a painting by my very dear friend Lindsey Brown. Lindsey is an artist and curator based in Brooklyn and Dutchess County, NY. Her work is in the permanent collection of The Portland Art Museum, is exhibited regularly in various New York galleries, and is hanging all over our house.

Lindsey is my oldest friend. We’re from the same town, went to the same boarding school, and then we went to the same college. We both lived in Boston for awhile, and then we both lived in New York. She’s one of those friends that you can lose contact with for months, but when you finally hook up with each other, you pick up right where you left off. If I feel like making her spit out her coffee, or collapse to the floor like a rag doll, gasping with laughter (Lindsey does that – she will actually end up on a heap on the floor if you’re not careful), I only have to say one or two words that instantly conjure some past humiliation or gaffe that we experienced/committed together.

She can just say a name and I fully understand her sorrow or joy, because I know all about this name. And vice versa. It’s impossible for me to hear a Joni Mitchell song without thinking of Lindsey. Like Joni (whose music we listened to all the time, for years, in our bedrooms, in dorm rooms, in cars, bars), Lindsey is an artist with a poetic sensibility and a love of nature and color and beauty and light. Denis isn’t wild about Joni Mitchell music, and my kids have threatened to throw themselves out of the car when she’s playing, so I can only listen to her when I’m in the car by myself and I always recall my times with Lindsey, and all our dreams and schemes, especially when I hear the words, “I am a lonely painter, I live in a box of paints….” Because Lindsey and I really thought of ourselves as these lonely, tortured artists, though we were never really alone, ever.