Paint-overs

Extreme restoration of old paintings

By The Artist Currently Known as John Pohl

As I near the halfway point of my life – yes, fewer than 80 years left! – I find myself fearing that my descendants will judge my artistic talent by a few bad paintings.

There’s a good chance they will. The family owns a 75-foot sailboat that a team of reformed writers manage for us. And for an extra ounce of gold, I pay them to to keep family members facing the wind in front of the main sail, a white patchwork of the backs of 12 x 16 paintings that I produced during my pre-famous years. If any one of them were to walk behind the sail to the leeward side, they would see the bad paintings, all sewn together into a holy mess of strident colours.

That boat has taken family members to Hawaii and other Caribbean ports, yet not once has one of them even glimpsed my paintings. My writers have worked hard to keep it that way. Meanwhile, I spend my days looking under floorboards of all the houses I’ve lived in to retrieve and repaint them before they can go on the market.

But I can foresee that one day, a curious descendant I’ll call Fred will walk under the sail and look up, stare in stupefaction, and give the alarm.

“Great-great-great-grandfather must return all his medals to the Order of Canada,” he yells. “The same goes for his FIFA peace trophy.”

To delay that all-too-real scenario, I’m subjecting anything deemed unworthy to a paint-over. One by one, the work goes on. If I can sell just 1,000 of the retreads, I’ll be able to buy a new sail and have it installed before anyone notices.

Below is one of the first of this new series. I think this painting of a Nova Scotia saltbox is boring at best, amateurish at worst. It could probably have been improved, but on the day I repainted it, I’d been working at paintings all afternoon and was starting to loosen up. I spent what seemed like 10 minutes to repaint it with the little piles of luscious colours I had on my palette.

I love the result. I know you hate it, Fred, so I hate you back, my dear, dear great- great grandson.

Affectionately yours,

The Artist Currently Known as John Pohl