Justin the Artistic Horse Garners International Attention
According to BDRB, the paintbrush-wielding animal uses his large, horse-sized mouth to create abstract and impressionist paintings that have sold for upwards of $2,500.
Huffington Post
It all began after the one-man Panufnik show in the Meatpacking District last year. But let me introduce myself. I’m Urban Sprawl, owner of the Sprawl Gallery. My specialty is taking risks and panning for fresh genius, and while none of the painters I’ve championed has yet emerged as this generation’s Pollock or Rothko, I have, through a combination of judicious fasting and taking in laundry, managed to keep my proboscis a Planck length above sea level. As it turned out, the reviews of Irving Panufnik, a painter in my opinion of indisputable vision, added less to our reputations than I had anticipated, and from the first day it was clear sales were steaming unobstructed to Zabriskie Point. One would think amongst all the scribes and culture mavens covering the show a word besides “schlock” would have occurred to at least one of them, although I was most stung by a suggestion of the critic that said Panufnik’s pictures might be more effective if they were hung facing the wall. Naturally, I assured the artist my faith in his talent was undiminished and the gallery would stand behind him, although the realities of the marketplace dictated we cut away the canvas portions of his work and peddle just the wood frames. Shaken by this latest assault on my aesthetic judgement and having to fend off an infestation of Visigoth creditors, I felt a day or two away from the art world’s tension and hypocrisy might be just the proper curry I needed to restore confidence and defuse the burgeoning urge to see what the third rail feels like.
And so it was on a Saturday I set out by car for an inn in Pennsylvania that promised tranquillity, good food, and perhaps even some pleasant birdwatching. Though the trip commenced under clear skies, it was not long before I looked up to notice overwrought nimbus clouds and it began to drizzle, causing me to stop at a farmhouse to ask directions. My GPS, accurate as a racetrack tout, steered me off course, and instead of heading toward Bucks County, I was approaching Niagara Falls.
The farmer, a codger named McFetish, couldn’t have been more amiable and asked me in for a hot cup of fog. Rustic, I think, was the mot juste for his digs, and yet, despite his hearth, pewter, and homespun samplers, I couldn’t help noticing a number of remarkable paintings strewn haphazardly about the place. There were landscapes with moody vistas that leapt off the canvas and a still life of apples the weight of cannon balls in a fruit bowl. The acrobats and ballet dancers depicted were bursting with energy, and I gasped at the originality of the frolicking nymphs and satyrs, all done with virtuoso brushstrokes, by a colorist the equal of Miró. Gobsmacked, I inquired who the painter was, as I hadn’t set eyes on works quite so impressive in years. McFetish said, “Oh, those are Waldo’s.”
“Waldo’s? Waldo whom?” I asked. “What’s his last name?”
“Ain’t got no last name,” he chortled, and, rising from his rocking chair, he led me to the barn where a spavined dray horse stood munching hay. “This here’s the maestro,” McFetish wheezed, pointing to the four-legged creature.
“Meaning what?” I queried. “Surely you aren’t saying he did the pictures?”
“Can’t get him to work. Spends all his darn time dabbling in oils.”
When I refused to believe the horse had done the paintings, especially the portrait of Diana Vreeland, McFetish put down a blank canvas and gave Waldo a brush, which the beast held between his teeth. Whinnying, he proceeded to paint one of the most poignant renderings of the Crucifixion I’d ever seen.
McFetish, a rube of Pa Kettle simplicity, was totally ignorant of what he had and was only too thrilled to unload Waldo and his entire oeuvre for a paltry six hundred garbanzo beans, and that included all the great works from the horse’s blue period. Speeding back to New York in a state of euphoria, I made plans to board Waldo and prepare for a one-man show. The only bummer was that the artist, having four legs and a tail, could reduce the entire phenomenon to mere novelty, severely diminishing its market value. In a frenzy, I hastily invented a fictitious genius whom I christened Fra Lippo Fensterblau and signed his name on each canvas with a flourish. Now all I needed to do was open the gallery doors, stand back, and move product. Well, talk about success! All up and down Great Jones Street there was a buzz, and who drops into the Sprawl Gallery? Only Hollywood studio head Harvey Nagila. Nagila was a quadrillionaire from his Oscar-winning film, Naked Coed Zombies from Pluto. He had recently purchased the old Jack Warner estate in Holmby Hills and was redoing it, making the former slave quarters into a tennis court and decorating the mansion in a combination of Louis the Sixteenth and Cro-Magnon. In an attempt to establish his bona fides as a class item, Nagila wanted to start an art collection and bought six Fra Lippo pictures, making the painter the must-have hot new thing amongst Tinseltown’s cognoscenti. Every collector from Malibu to Beverly Hills purchased a canvas, and there was great eagerness to meet the genius, visit his studio, and perhaps commission portraits—not to mention an offer of seven figures for him to come to Hollywood and act as consultant to a top star who would be playing Tintoretto in the upcoming film, Brushstrokes and Bootys. At first I covered, saying Fensterblau was an eccentric loner, but as time went on and none of my tap dancing could be verified, stories began to circulate that maybe all was not kosher as it looked. When Rose Banshee, one of those truffle-hunting Hollywood tabloid yentas, ran a blind item that someone in New York had seen a food bill of the artist’s and that an inordinate figure was spent on hay, I panicked. A call to my lawyer, Nolan Contendere, brought reassurance that in a fraud case, while my financial liability might be rather stiff, a prison term would not exceed five years. By now I had taken to sauteing my Xanax for culinary variety when suddenly it hit me—Morris Prestopnick, an out-of-work actor I knew who currently set his table jerking the beer pulls at Regurgito’s, a bar in Queens, might just be my magic bullet. Prestopnick’s career had hit a bump when his portrayal of Hamlet had been compared by the critics to Elmer Fudd, sending the actor scurrying for solace to a certain Mr. Jack Daniels. At first he felt impersonating a painter was beneath him, but when he heard he would be playing to film colony heavies, he saw it as a career move leading to a three-picture deal complete with a house, pool, and valet parking.
We schemed over pickled meat where I laid the skinny on him, and two days later, Prestopnick, having worked out a rich backstory for the persona of the fictitious Fra, sat beside me on a 747 en route to La-La Land for a party in his honor at Nagila’s Holmby Hills Xanadu.
Things began well enough, although I could have lived without the actor’s choice of a beret and fake Van Dyke to limn the character clearly as a dauber.
His decision to play Fra Lippo with a clubfoot and as an embittered megalomaniac proved a scintilla broad to a cinema crowd used to acting of a less declamatory style and garnered some raised eyebrows. Despite a solemn oath that he would lay off the blended malt, I clocked at least five tumblers of Jack surreptitiously siphoned by Prestopnick to stanch his jitters. Fawned over at first by celebrities and moguls, the actor overcompensated by hamming it up as he strutted and fretted bombastically, portraying the belligerent egomaniac he had fabricated via the Stanislavski protocols. When several guests challenged his credibility and the star J. Caroll Nosh accused his accent of tergiversating from Hungarian to Korean, flop sweat began irrigating his forehead. With the alcohol level in his bloodstream suddenly reversing centuries of evolution, he turned on the guests in a fury.
“My god,” he howled, “what a collection of shallow boobs. So this is Hollywood royalty. Pardon me while I guffaw.”
At first the A-listers weren’t sure if they were hearing correctly. Then, seizing Nagila’s Oscar from the mantle, Prestopnick bellowed defiantly that an Oscar didn’t hold a candle to a Broadway Tony, which he had been cheated out of for his electrifying portrayal of Asa Muchnick in Ragtime Cretin.
“You West Coast phonies think you have taste, do you?” he ranted.
“Well, the joke’s on you lamp heads. These pictures were done by a horse. That’s right, a nag, a cheval, holding a brush between his teeth.”
With that, a Bel Air dowager leaped from her seat and yelled, “Of course! That accounts for why when I unwrapped the landscape I bought from him, some oats dropped out!”
“It all jibes with the story on Entertainment Tonight,” another yelled, “about some farmer they found named McFetish.”
“Then it’s not art, it’s pure gimmickry,” cried a third. “Like that chicken that plays tic-tac-toe in Chinatown.”
“Some discerning taste,” joshed a guest, pointing to Harvey Nagila. “What a chuckle this story will be at the next Producers Guild meeting.” Nagila flushed crimson, and he started making the same noise a pinball machine makes before flashing Tilt. Then, many present realizing they had likewise been euchred into writing checks, all eyes turned to me and a motion was floated that they secure a drum with tar and slit the sofa cushions to amass feathers. Only my own artistic genius, which rivaled not Lucas Cranach the Elder but Douglas Fairbanks the elder, saved me, and in a trice I was through an open window and vaulting the high hedges that keep the ninety-nine percent from watching their betters knock back black eggs and margaritas. From there it was to LAX in record time, where I was aloft to the city that never sleeps.
As far as a certain equestrian maestro goes, legal counsel thought it best I retire Waldo and let him ply his gift solely for fun in the manner of the great Winston Churchill. Of course, I’m laying low till a typhoon of lawsuits blows out to sea, and I’m eschewing the muses, although I have noticed my cat likes to scramble around playfully over the piano keys and has managed to plunk out a few small sonatas that are easily the equal of anything by Scriabin.
via SkyHorse Publishing https://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/9781956763294/zero-gravity/
I enjoy running to the dictionary or the most convenient web browser to capture these references like Easter eggs:
Proboscis: an elephants trunk
Planck length: Physicist Max Planck’s 1.616255×10⁻³⁵
(Keeping your nose above water)
Zabriskie Point: east of Death Valley
My favorite: tergiversating - evasion of a clear-cut statement
I’ll spare you the rest.
Hava Nagila, Hav two nagila, hav three nagila, they’re very small.
Thanks for my Saturday fun-time read aka Timeout.
Frank in New Hope, PA and MA kettlebell