Fluffy and the clown

Art and story by John Pohl

It was a dark and stormy night.

But 12 hours later, the sun was shining and a cooling breeze was flowing gently through the trees. Only the hydrophobic were still huddling inside their apartments, waiting for the humidity to blow away.

Under a canopy of leaves along the Lachine Canal near the Charlevoix Bridge, a humble artist known as Mr. Cobb was frustrated. He had been ordered to return to the studio with a salable drawing by suppertime or he’d be eating a bowl of dry oats with his cup of warm tea. Supper was barely an hour away.

Mr. Cobb had chased off two school kids for their seat on a bench just off the canal path. But he was too close to his subjects. The cyclists, joggers, walkers – even the woman pushing her baby carriage – were but blurs in his drawing.

He had first drawn a lush background with a finely detailed heritage building. Now he had to duplicate its best qualities in a foreground that featured people relaxing in the park or walking along the canal.

But the humble artist’s attempts to integrate humans into his finely detailed landscape almost destroyed it. His repeated erasures of blurred images of joggers and speed walkers had erased most of the heritage building around them. One more erasure would put a hole in his drawing. This had to be it.

Then Mr. Cobb saw a man two benches down. A seated figure enjoying the park! And with a fluffy little white dog at his feet. Perfect!

Mr. Cobb had to twist his body and turn his neck to see his subject clearly. Dreams of a Nobel Prize for artistic hardship flitted through his mind. He started drawing.

Mr. Cobb observed the right side of his subject, a sturdy-looking guy wearing a black T-shirt, black shorts and dark glasses. Another man sat next to his subject and was conversing with him, but Mr. Cobb could barely see him, so he drew only the dog and the man he could see clearly.

As our humble artist was restoring the building to the drawing, he felt eyes on him. He looked up into the smiling face of a dapper man in a billowy purple and yellow striped shirt and a blue shorts with polka dots. He almost winked as he brushed past, pulling the little white dog along with him. Mr. Cobb realized this was the man conversing with his subject.

Fifteen feet behind the dapper clown was the man in black. He looked straight ahead as he slowly passed Mr. Cobb, as if being guided by the yapping of the little dog. Mr. Cobb quickly concluded that the man’s dark glasses hid damaged eyes, that he was blind, that the dapper clown had stolen the other man’s miniature service dog, and that its blind owner was too shy to call out, “Stop, Thief!” And the artist himself felt too weakened by hunger to give chase.

But Mr. Cobb did know what to do. Call Madame K, an art detective who had recently discovered a scam involving down payments of up to $1,000 for a commissioned dog portrait by an esteemed artist. But the portrait delivered to the buyer was a shabbily executed painting by an unknown artist, she told him.

The private eye had outlined the scam: A band of con artists agreed to help the esteemed artist reach his goal of 1,000 dog paintings. After several years of almost constant toil, the esteemed artist counted but 65 finished works. The con artists promised to finish the job in six months.

The esteemed artist did insist on seeing paintings before he signed them, Madame K. told Mr. Cobb. But the esteemed artist wouldn’t sign anything until the con artists improved the quality of their work.

“Their solution was to upgrade the quality of their models,” she said.“Now they’re out looking for purebreds to steal.”

Mr. Cobb was excited. He had a drawing of the victim! All he had to do was track down the victim, get his description of the dog thief, and then go after the thief.

He’d get his Nobel for crime fighting! But supper, maybe not.