The Last Good Dog by Alan Russell

Author:Alan Russell [Russell, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Three Tails Press
Published: 2021-04-26T16:00:00+00:00

The administrative offices consisted of an accounting office, mail room, marketing and sales office, design center, and conference room. We passed by several people at work behind the glassed walls. Preston, Inc., was almost as impressive as Preston.

We sat down opposite one another at the conference room table. I slid an oversized manila envelope Preston’s way and said, “I’d like you to look at the contents inside and give me your impressions.”

The envelope contained three examples of Ellis Haines’s artwork. In one, a work titled Not Christina’s World, Haines had portrayed a woman sprawled out on the floor. The woman’s head was either nonexistent or lost in the shadows. The second drawing was titled Palmistry and showed Haines’s hands palm-side up. The image was extremely detailed, from the lines in his hands to more indistinct fingerprint whorls. The last drawing showed an American house spider waiting in a disarrayed web, a work Haines had called Tangled Web.

I would have liked to have included more samples, but these three were all that was available. Haines had always been controlling about what artwork he allowed to be photographed. These drawings had been part of an article published in Vanity Fair, a piece I suspected he’d agreed to after being assured Annie Leibovitz would be doing the shoot. Part of her pictorial had showed Haines at work on the drawings.

“What is it you’d like me to comment on?” Preston asked.

“Just your thoughts in general.”

“At the onset, I should offer the disclaimer that I am not a big fan of pen-and-ink photorealism, but even so, the artist is certainly skilled. These representations are highly competent and quite workmanlike.”

“That sounds as if you’re damning with faint praise.”

“That wasn’t my intention. It’s just that I find works like these sterile. For me, such drawings lack soul. I want something that’s more than skin deep, but as I said, that’s my own bias.”

I found myself nodding. “I don’t know anything about art, but that’s how I feel as well. Like you, though, it might be my own bias at work. All of those pieces were drawn by Ellis Haines.”

Preston took a second look at the images. “That might explain some things.”

“Such as?”

“Haines strangled his victims, did he not?”

“He did. Early on, the media dubbed him the Santa Ana Strangler. Only later did he become known as the Weatherman.”

“That explains why he painted his own hands. It was his self-portrait. Most artists paint their faces, but Haines wanted his hands displayed. His title, Palmistry, tells us that. In his drawing, he’s letting us read his palms, and what they really tell about him.”

I reached for the image of the sprawled woman’s body and held it up. “No face here either.”

“I suspect his drawing, and its title, is a play on Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World. The woman that Wyeth painted was a neighbor who was unable to walk. From his vantage point, Wyeth could see her crawling through fields. Haines’s subject doesn’t have a head, and lies unmoving on the ground.

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