The Hot Climate of Promises and Grace by Steven Nightingale

Author:Steven Nightingale
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619028647
Publisher: Counterpoint Press
Published: 2016-09-01T16:00:00+00:00

Told to me near of the top of the island, much loved by Saint Francis, that is in the center of Lago Trasimeno, in Umbria, a region in the center of Italy. This is a site with a primitive church, where the shadows seem to be at play—almost as if they had heard the Canticle of the Sun.

The storyteller was a former nun married to a former priest. They were both there that day. They seemed aglow.

WORK MAY BE GOOD FOR SOMETHING

Once there was a painter who lived in Umbria. She painted rivers, country roads, stone houses; flowers, bridges, fields. This world, she thought in her simple way, was what we see, and more than what we see; what is apparent, and the animate beauty within.

Years passed, and more years, and the painter became famous, quite beyond her intentions, even beyond her awareness. In the land where she worked, and in countries across the oceans, her work was much in demand, and it sold for remarkable sums. Yet this prosperity meant very little in the daily life of the painter. As she had always, she rose early in the morning and began her beloved work.

One day after receiving an impressive check in the mail from the sale of a single piece of hers, she started to wonder if some of the buyers paid not so much for the work itself, but for her very name; so that her paintings risked being merely exhibited, rather than being a source of life. And so, one splendid night over a bottle of Sagrantino, she resolved to begin selling her paintings with more craft and anonymity, with a more impish strategy. Her idea was to have them bought by those who saw value in them, beyond the vagaries of reputation and the movements of the marketplace.

Sometimes she placed her work in galleries under a different name. Sometimes she would sell pieces herself but claim that they were the work of other artists from other countries, or, depending on the style, from another century. Most fun of all, on the days of the big flea market she would gather some household goods and some paintings, and from a booth in the market sell her work for modest offerings to those she saw were examining her canvasses with high-hearted patience and penetrating bemusement. One advantage to such a buyer, of course, was that one day she would discover that the painting on the wall of her little house was worth a treasure fit for a pasha.

All of this felt inevitable, and so our painter began to wonder how she might extend her mischievous activity. And slowly, as day after day she worked, her meditations concentrated within her, and all manner of ideas and stratagems occurred to her. If she, as a guest in someone’s house or apartment, saw there an order of beauty in formation, she would wait her chance. Then one day she would return when she knew the house was empty, make her way

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