Parade de cirque

My grandfather, your great grandfather, painted The Last Supper. His was the first version I ever saw. It was as wide as he was tall, and he was a tall man. He had it ornately framed, and it took up most of a small guest-bedroom wall. Barely in grade school back then, I was in awe.

His secret was paint-by-numbers. He was an absolute master of that rarely studied genre, and, like most masters of arcane and disrespected arts, he was without honor, even in his own home. My father and uncles saw their father’s paintings as amusingly pointless monstrosities. My grandmother, who aspired to the good taste of the college-educated middle class that she vividly imagined but to which she did not belong, tried to keep his masterpieces out of sight. His smaller paintings were mostly relegated to the basement where he also kept his woodworking tools, his workbench, and his breeding tanks for tropical fish. A later generation would have called it his “man cave” or some such silliness. He called it the workshop, full stop. 

When I was allowed to visit that dim downstairs, to stare at the golden green glass tanks burbling with fish that sparkled, to be shown how the fry were kept safe from eating each other, to gingerly handle the heavy metal tools arrayed in neat rows over the workbench, I felt as if I were in the viscera of an ongoing creation where my grandfather was a demigod. His poorly lit but brightly colored paintings that lined the basement walls could as well have been stained-glass windows to me, or the Stations of the Cross, so heavy with solemn reverence the dank air felt. 

The tricks to his painting skills included patience, restraint, a trust in authority, and a surgeon’s steady hand. These also happened to be among his chief personal characteristics. No matter how large the numbers rose—the larger paintings came with kits counting over a hundred premixed colors—he never by mistake or experiment put a dab in the wrong spot. No matter how tiny and oddly gerrymandered the individual patches, he never smeared two colors or strayed so much as a brush hair over a color line.

His own family was considerably messier, both in practice and in coloration. His middle son was a literal mutant who lived in a wheelchair, dabbled in oils, and somehow became a moderately successful cabinetmaker. His eldest son was a golden boy as tall as himself; his youngest son struggled to get through school and married his pregnant girlfriend when both were in their teens, a pattern repeated by their own children. Some of the other grandchildren were mixed race, individually and collectively, and included several adoptees. His favorite grandchild may have been my Korean sister, Kim, who arrived in the States as a badly malnourished three-year old in 1969 and who would sometimes follow Grandpa around his house as a toddler, clutching the remains of a breakfast orange that she refused to surrender, her perpetual snot bridging her nose and her upper lip. 

Nothing, in fact, was well contained or precise about his grandchildren’s generation, from our haircuts to our shapes to our behaviors, which is one reason why my grandfather’s silent obsession with tightly confined painting so fascinated me. His finished pieces were fantastic practical lessons in the power of distance and perspective. When I stayed overnight, I always asked to sleep in the little bedroom with that giant Last Supper opposite my narrow bed. From across the room in early morning twilight, it was impossible to see the dividing lines. Subtle colors shaded into one another, shapes almost moved, and the disciples’ diverse personalities glowed. You just needed the right angle and the right light to see the genius of the despised thing.

It was a decade before I saw a painting by Georges Seurat, when I was on a high-school field trip to the Met, and realized how much could be done with distinct color dots. Parade de cirque. I was thunderstruck. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, get on the Internet and look. See that spooky figure in the center, hooded and holding a trombone, entirely composed of tiny dots, just like all the rest? Had no one told my grandfather such a thing was possible? Had no one manufactured a paint-by-numbers kit to challenge a natural pointillist, a kit in which every myriad number dictated precisely the same-shaped dot? 

A century before my grandfather’s death, Seurat had painted the one musician who would have been most appropriate at the funeral where I gave the eulogy. After the service I drove home, opened my third-hand coffee-table volume of Great Impressionist Art, looked at the blurry, lurid reproductions of agreed-upon greatness, thought of those long-lost number paintings that had been disposed of when my grandparents moved into their last condo, and knew I should have wept.