Cosmos House
Fall 2007
Oil on Panel
60” x 42”
I was in the Mohegan Lake A&P, buying reading glasses, as is my wont, when I noticed two kids ( 4 & 5) in one of those big, plastic,orange race-car shopping carts. They were in the pharmacy line with their mom, and they were carrying on & bouncing around, so I started joking with them. It turns out the little girl, Caramia, is quite the little artist, according to mom. I gave them postcards I'd had made of this painting. It turns out mom is quite the talker, and I'm listening to a portion of her life story as the kids are speaking to me and free - associating over the images. Somehow through mom& brother Jacob, I heard Caramia assert that she used to live in that house; the one pictured in the card ( the card of the painting I'm supposed to be talking about ).That made me think of the print on the wall of 'Cold Spring Pizza', which is right near where the brick 'cosmo' houseis. The print is one we had in our house when I was very little; It's a kind of mass-market hommage to byegone americana, and pictures a boy fishing off the old mill stream bridge, barefoot, wearing the de rigeur straw hat, in the shade of a big willow tree, with an unusually variegated clapboard ( barn?) in the background; each clapboard being a slightly different shade, or tone. It was printed on a kind of pebbled carboard, and very nicely done, for what it was; a kind of Winslow Homer-"lite'. Anyway, it was evocative enough for me to proclaim, when I was four or so, that I had lived there - maybe I felt that the print depicted our past, like the framed photographs next to it. Maybe it just shows the impact things have on kids.