Original Art Work

I came upon this little gem at 2nd Chance Thrift Store on Wornall in Kansas City, MO. I have been thinking for some time about how discarded items at thrift stores evoke the lives of previous owners, and this one got my gears turning on what kind of life the artist might have had.



Clearly this was an art student who wanted to express himself. He expressed the desire to express himself through this expressive painting. I try to stay away from expressions like, "Abstraction Expressionism was a useless dead-end that legitimized every bad tendency in the art establishment," but sometimes thrift store items call for a strong stance.

No matter how suggestive an artifact, it always excludes most of the specifics of the previous owner's life that would transform it from a mystery to a banality. With this painting, for example, I can't work out whether it was his mother or his girlfriend who put him through his angry three semesters of college.