Caroline N. Simpson

Mouth and Foot Painting Artists in London

The artist pictures on page one of the calendar are in analog grain: ’80s haircuts and turtlenecks, paintbrushes in mouths, wheelchairs pushed close to the canvas. At the top of the page: Best wishes from the artists. Some painted with their toes.

My dad often showed me these calendars, fascinated by how people could create something so beautiful from such a life.

When I inherited his art supplies, Calendar 2001 was in the bag. Along with 12 photocopied enlargements of the cover. A still life. Flowers in a vase.

In color, the blossoms reflected their orange on the table and wall. Unidentifiable types as if a child had painted the idea of flowers.

The 12 photocopies are in black and white. An optical engineer by trade, he’d patented color xerography at Xerox. But in this exercise, he went back to a time before he invented anything.

Each zoomed in on a different part of the painting. One was nearly all black: the space behind the vase. Was he studying contrast? Brushstroke?

It’s a three-year calendar, 2001 sandwiched between the year I graduated college and the year he died. I’m always forgetting if he was alive during 9/11. I called home from a payphone in Glacier National Park, but I couldn’t get through. Did I call both of them separately, divorced by then? Was one of my consolations, I’m glad he didn’t see the direction the world’s going in? I often have to google his obit.

He was in the middle of an art assignment when he died. Learning to do something. And now I hold the lesson, unfinished.

I’m joining my dad in furthering myself from the thing. My copy is also black and white. We are playing telephone with image. Even the calendar is reproductions from original pictures.

Black font on white page gives you this picture: I’m pulling a vase of flowers out of a bag. The bag I saw him tote to painting class at the Senior Center every week. The color’s gone, and I zoom in on the black space behind the vase.

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Caroline N. Simpson’s chapbook, Choose Your Own Adventures and Other Poems, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2018. In 2020, Delaware Division of Arts awarded Caroline an Established Artist Fellowship in Poetry, and she has been nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize in both poetry and nonfiction. See more at carolinensimpson.com.