MY FATHER DID THAT ONCE

Heaven forbid that it should ever happen, but if the fireman shook his head and said that only one or two items could be saved, I would not hesitate making value judgments but rush in to snatch the painting which hangs on the east wall of our dining room. Farewell, Pendelton shirts and Daniel's patient R2 D2.

It is a rather tall oil painting of a proud stag, standing with head raised on a rocky path at the edge of a stream. The canvas is now about a century old, frozen there. The stag has never lowered his head to drink (unless he does when no one is watching). My father painted that when he was a student at the Chicago Art Institute. It is a rather free copy; many have painted stags in such a pose. But as it is we prize it.

That young fellow who was to become my father years later also painted several versions of a noble dog when he was a student in Chicago. One version he gave to his younger brother Christ, and it hung, and hangs still, in Uncle Christ's modest house in Pandora, Ohio. The dog has kept close watch over the house, even though Uncle Christ and his wife have long gone away.

My father did not become a famous painter. He turned at about this time to other callings and left the Institute after he had won a contest with his dog. The wag might observe that this fellow also did not become a famous father.

If society has had difficulty defining art, we can understand why we also have arguments about the support of the artist. What quality is basic to art? Not easy to say. We can at once set aside the position which seems to please some: "If the creator says it is art, then it is art." In our hearts all of us Dabblers know this is not true. Beyond that, we can discover several fundamental concepts.

- Art is not Meat and Potatoes. It serves no life-vital purpose. We can live without Art, but not without meat and potatoes.

- Art is distinctive in man. (But have you read about the Bower Bird?) Our darling poodle lives closely with us. I will suffer no one to say an unkind word about Sadie. But she has never glanced at Dad's painting. Were it closer to the floor, she would gnaw up the frame. Neither does she listen when Daniel plays his version of Pachelbel's Canon on the piano.

- Art endures. Samuel Johnson mulls over the dictum that a classic in art must be at least a century old. Some is much, much older. The paintings on the walls of caves in Spain remind us that those who sketched hunting scenes in the dusky grotto thousands of years ago were like us and not like Sadie. The process of art is a winnowing fan and a crucible. Dross and chaff are thrown away. There is a kind of eternity here. I go to a museum to visit my old friend Vincent VanGogh. Even as I write this in my office, a collage of nine of his self portraits look down at me. Perhaps he was not a happy man, but I would forfeit my happiness for the legacy he left all of us. Meat and potatoes tell me nothing of what it means to be a man. VanGogh does.

- From the earliest use of the word, art and artist suggests and requires high skill. We preserve these concepts still. "He is a real artist."

"At what?"

Maybe even at picking locks.

Beyond these topics, some difficult matters remain unanswered. Obviously the artist must eat. Kipling writes of that ideal paradise of the artist when,

"No one will work for money,

And No one will work for fame;

But each for the joy of the working...."

I believe in that idea too. Art fundamentally moves in a world where there are no dollars. But the paintings of my Father's stag is my most valuable single asset.