My Near Death Experience Arts and Thoughts

It was sometime around 1967 or maybe ’68 when I bought an art piece for $500 — quite a sum back then. Today, that would be worth about $4,654.83, which still feels like a lot for something so quietly haunting. The piece stood about two and a half feet tall, a foot and a half wide, and nearly a foot deep. It wasn’t just a painting — it glowed from within a carved wooden box, its light spilling softly across the little world inside.

The artist’s name has long since slipped from my memory, but his work has never left me. He’d captured a lonely city corner where a homeless man sat slumped with a beer in his hand, his clothes wrinkled and dirty. Behind him, cobwebs hung in the windows like fragile lace, and the cracked cement below him looked just like the worn sidewalks of any forgotten city street. A single bulb illuminated the scene, casting long shadows, and if I remember right, there was even a black cat behind a door, hissing quietly at the man as he leaned against the frame, his tired feet resting down the steps.

Even now, I can still see that dim little light glowing — a reminder of how art can make sorrow beautiful, and how memory keeps its own kind of light burning.

In the year 2000 my home burned down claiming the sculpture or most of it and reflecting on it now, really miss it.

My Art

Similar feelings illustrating from my art as in the sculptured city corner.