Originally ran in Sunday, October 3, 2021 of The Times and The News-Star

The electric bill was due again.

It seems to be a jump ball on whether or not you or I will get the virus.

The dog was due for her bi-annual vet visit, which would cost a paw and a leg, and I need a new pair of tenny shoes.

Worst of all, “Business Insider” had told me that a bacon shortage could be looming.

Mercy.

So a lot of dreary things were on my mind when I got in the passenger side front seat of the sedan for the trip back home from a meeting in Baton Rouge. JJ was in the back because he’s used to being in the back when he goes with his real friends on golf trips.

That put our buddy Fresh behind the wheel. Sort of.

This became a problem that knocked a couple years off my life.

The trip down had been great. Camaraderie. Laughter. The guys and all.

But phone calls had to be made by Fresh on the trip back. And that’s when business picked up.

Highway 190. You know Highway 190. She’s dependable and true, but she’s not interstate and there are multiple fields you can drive right into. Fields and bayous and basins and front yards. And that’s what I thought was going to happen while Fresh, flirting with the speed limit in a courteous and responsible but unlawful way, started to try and hook up a three-way call on speaker phone with another friend who had actually pulled over, she said, to make the call.

Not us. We were a 5.3L V8 small-block engine-powered black bullet.

It was my own fault, really. I am a grandma driver. Hands at 10 and 2. Setting the cruise at three miles over the speed limit to see if I can get away with something. The only time I got a speeding ticket was one night when I was starving and wrestling with a bag of Chili Cheese Fritos and more concerning with getting them open than the speed limit. The Mississippi trooper got my attention not 30 seconds after I’d pulled out of the convenience store.

I’m no daredevil.

Neither is Fresh, but he has much more Evil Knievel in him than either me or JJ, who was white-knuckling it in the back. During this never-ending series of phone calls, I was trying to help Fresh drive by making various squealing and gasping sounds. Fresh, who lives a lot of his life behind the wheel and on the phone, didn’t seem to notice, comfortable as a trout in a stream.

There is a big and very long and, to me, very narrow bridge that crosses the northern end of the Atchafalaya Basin on Highway 190, and it is on this bridge that I’ve always known one day I would die. If I’m driving alone, I center the two lanes going either east or west. On this day, I just closed my eyes and, it being Sunday evening, felt it appropriate to pump my mental brakes and pray.

The overriding thought was that I was in a very fast-moving vehicle with two of my best friends in the world but was not going to be able to attend either of their funerals because I was going to be the guest of honor at my own.

Plus, no more bacon.

Somehow, we made it to Krotz Springs, the Speeding Ticket Capital of the World. Fresh was topping the bridge to go into Krotz Springs Proper at 78 miles per hour, lost in telephone conversation, when JJ and I both made girly noises—I might have screamed—knocking Fresh back down from A.J. Foyt speed to a legal 35 in the time it took to say, “I’m sorry, officer; how fast did you say I was going?”

Fortunately, we made it all the way back. No tickets, no dents, maybe just a little loss of pride. Thrilling, electrifying, and terrifying, a weird trifecta.

Somedays you get to steer the ship, somedays you get taken for a ride. Wear your seat belt either way.

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By DON WALKER/Designated Contributor

There are a lot of famous quotes about art – although I was aware of none of them until I did an Internet search that immediately called up “101 Quotes about Art if you need some inspiration.”

Well, I needed only a quote but inspiration never hurt anybody, so I was game.

“Art is a line around your thoughts,” said Gustav Klimt. I had to look him up just so I don’t find out sometime later on that I was quoting some random guy’s grandmother named Gustav. Turns out Klimt is an Austrian painter. My Uncle Charlie Wolfe is an American painter, but when he’s done putting a second coat on someone’s living room ceiling I’ve never heard him say he’d just put a line around his thoughts, although there usually is a good amount of paint spatter on his face.

Speaking of ceiling painters, there’s Michelangelo. He’s an artist whose name I recognize. He said, “If people only knew how hard I work to gain my mastery. It wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.” I don’t question his artistry, but I’m a little suspect about his grammar. Did he really mean to say that in two sentences? I get the sense he’s trying to be humble, but written as two sentences I’m left with the impression that he’s really being more of a whiner.

Then I have to question the motive behind this off-putting quote about artistry being used in an article that promises to inspire me: “Inspiration is for amateurs,” said artist Chuck Close.  “The rest of us show up and get the work done. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you’re going to make an awful lot of work.” I had to look him up too because “Chuck” is a name I didn’t expect to see among a lineup of famous artists with names like Michelangelo, Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet, Salvador Dali, and so on. But there he was, and he was listed as “Chuck Close, Artist of Outsized Reality.” He died this year at the age of 81, and he’s best known for colossal portraits.

As I scanned through the article of Chuck Close, I was suddenly inspired beyond my wildest expectations when I ran across this sentence: “Mr. Close began using an airbrush and diluted black paint to create highly detailed nine-foot-tall grisaille paintings based on mug-shot-like photographs of himself and friends.”

I was inspired to write this very article for the very reasons stated at the end of that sentence: “mug-shot-like photographs.” And that’s my question exactly: Is it truly art if it’s mug-shot-like?”

For the past several years I have had this ongoing debate whenever I look for more upscale pieces of art to put in my home. By upscale I mean something that is more of an actual piece of painted art versus a print that you might find already framed at a Walmart or Target. The wife and I spend a lot of weekends at art festivals looking for works by local artists and for meaningful pieces that speak to us – whether it’s a scenic piece of a place we’ve visited or one that truly captures the aesthetics of Florida and why we want to spend the rest of our lives here.

The more I see art, though, the more I see that there’s a thin line between what is truly art versus what is a painting that looks like a photograph, or a photograph that looks like a painting, or a cartoon and a caricature.

If you just want a big picture of my face, hence a “mug-shot-like photograph,” then take a picture with a camera and blow it up beyond proportion. Where’s the art in that? And if you’re doing it instead with pen and ink, why spend all that time drawing, shading, and painting for what amounts to a hand-drawn mug-shot-like photograph?

You want to color it all up Peter Max-style, or like a Leonard Neiman painting? Call it art if you want, but sure seems a lot like a cartoon to me.

When a picture is so detailed that it becomes more of a snapshot, or so distorted and colorful it becomes cartoonish or a caricature, I have a hard time calling that art. Well done, maybe. Interesting to the eye, sure. But is that a true work of art?

When I think of true art and artistry, I remember a time as a young man living in Louisiana and a lazy Saturday afternoon spent channel surfing on the TV, where I ran across a curly-headed, bearded guy with a soft-spoken voice on the Public Broadcasting Station. I watched him as he turned a blank white canvas into a whispering stream using delicate strokes of a paint brush. It wasn’t a small brush you’d picture in an artist’s hand, but the kind one might use to paint a wall in their home. As he painted, the stream began to split the landscape under a clear blue sky. The leaves on the trees that lined the stream’s banks hinted it was early fall. Patches of grass and weeds stretched like fingers along the bank, and a sheen on the water’s surface reflected the day glow of sunlight peeking through the piney woods. It was already a beautiful piece of art in my eyes, but then he snaked a palette knife delicately down the middle of the languid stream and brought that narrow, winding body of water so much to life you could almost hear it trickle over some rocks that were also painted by the artist to complete his magical streamscape. “Just let it happen,” he said.

Not a photo, nor a cartoon, but a painted masterpiece as far as I was concerned. He had taken me to a place that doesn’t even exist, but brought it to life in front of my eyes.

The more I think about art, the more I think Bob Ross was onto something.

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