As far back as I can remember, maybe age four or five, a
small oil painting hung in my grandparents’ living room. It portrayed a young boy dancing in the woods. The ornate gilt frame measured twice the size of the canvas. The
boy wore rolled-up linen britches and a frilly linen shirt. His waist coat appeared to be soft. Tousled brown locks topped his exuberant feminine face, so life-like that he appeared to move.
I named him The Dancing
Boy.
There was nothing for a young girl to do at my grandparents’
house. The tick and bong of a clock in the dining room cut
through the quiet to mark the passage of every slow hour. My paternal grandmother
was a fairly terse German woman who held on tight to every minute of her escape
from WWII. Whenever I visited, I would plan my own escape by spending an
inordinate amount of time staring at that painting, chased by my own imagination.
I made-up all kinds of stories about that young dancing boy. What did the music
sound like to inspire him to dance? Why were his bare toes
so dirty when he’s wearing fancy clothes? Did he run away from home? Did
he have to dance in secret because his parents were too strict? Who are the two shadowy adults in the background?
As I approached my late-teens, my questions focused om the painting itself. I broke through my fear of my grandmother to dig a bit
deeper into its history. She told me it was created in the early 1800s and had
been given to her as a gift by her employer after an elaborate
remodel of a guest bedroom. In fact, most of the furniture in my grandparents' Georgetown home were cast-offs from that wealthy family. She
also told me the painting had been a rescued section of a much larger piece that
had been destroyed by fire.
To me, that little cutaway had become its own work of art.
After my grandparents passed away, The Dancing Boy hung in my parents’ living room for over thirty
years. My Dad requested I research how best to have it professionally cleaned
and conserved. Decades of cigarette smoke had veiled the luminous skin tones,
vivid details of the boy’s frock, and richness of the woodsy vegetation. I took
the piece out of its heavy frame for any indication of the artist. Nothing. But
I did discover it had been painted on wood, not canvas.
I took The Dancing Boy
to the Portland Art Museum for a deeper inspection by the curator. My Mom freaked a bit, however, because she was convinced that The Dancing Boy had been stolen by the Nazis and didn’t want me to
get busted. Geez, Mom! And I thought I had a vivid imagination.
The curator’s eyes lit up when I showed him the painting.
Under the glow of lighted magnifying glasses, he made all sorts of noises: “hmmm
. . . ahhh . . . mmm.” Then he raised his head and nearly blinded me before
switching off his headgear. “As far as I can tell, it’s definitely Early
American, around the Revolutionary War," he said. "But without an identifying signature, it’s hard to say who might’ve painted it. Whoever it was, they were
damn good.”
“Damn good to know,” I said.
Then my imagination started to
race with more stories. Maybe Ben Franklin had been in the company of the
original painting, or Washington, Adams, Hamilton, or Jefferson. I suddenly heard tankards
clinking and the scratching of quilled words on the Declaration of
Independence. That would certainly be cause for a budding young man to dance in the woods.
The possibilities were endless. I packed up the painting and hung it back on
my parents’ living room wall, my soul having grown ten times in size that day.
On Christmas morning of 2012, my parents came by the house for our traditional exchange of gifts. We had spend limits in place, so gifts were usually gag-like in nature. My Dad had been failing rapidly, and I knew he would only exist
in my heart quite soon. I sat him on the couch in the living room and handed
him a cup of coffee. He pointed to the front door.
“Go out to the truck and get that big box in the back.”
I did as I was told, of course. I had no idea what my
parents had given me, but my pulse raced like a hummingbird's. I brought in the
box and set it on the floor in front of my father.
“Go ahead and open it,” he said. “It’s for you, not me.”
And when I did, I broke into tears. He had given me The Dancing Boy. I didn’t know what to
say, but my Dad did:
“It’s yours now, kid. I wanted to be able to see the look on
your face before I’m dead.”
Dad. A steel-belted marshmallow.
It took only fifty years to come up with the ultimate story
about The Dancing Boy. The painting became the subject of magical realism in my second novel of the Stitches Trilogy, Brushes. The three-book series—Stitches, Brushes, and Riffs—centers on a baby boomer couple, Jean and Spence Collins, who find a
magical artifact at an estate sale. When they discover it holds the key to immortality, they set off on quite the world adventure, but not without getting into serious trouble with the FBI. It’s a bit like The Thin Man meets History Detectives—with a twist
of magic.
I relived every wondrous moment of little-girl imagination
when I wrote Brushes. And immortalizing
The Dancing Boy forever on its
printed pages means that I, too, have added to the painting's long history.
Courtney Pierce is a fiction writer living in Milwaukie, Oregon, with her husband. stepdaughter, and their brainiac cat, Princeton. Courtney writes for the baby boomer audience. By day, she is an executive in the entertainment industry and uses her time in a theater seat to create stories that are filled with heart, humor and mystery. She has studied craft and storytelling at the Attic Institute and has completed the Hawthorne Fellows Program for writing and publishing. Active in the writing community, Courtney is a board member of the Northwest Independent Writers Association and on the Advisory Council of the Independent Publishing Resource Center. She is a member of Willamette Writers, Pacific Northwest Writers Association, and She Writes. The Executrix received the Library Journal Self-E recommendation seal.  |
| Coming Soon! Book 3 of the Dushane Sisters Trilogy |
Check out all of Courtney's books:
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Print and E-books are available through most major online retailers, including Amazon.com.
The Dushane Sisters Trilogy concludes with Indigo Legacy, due out in the fall, 2018. There's love in the air for Olivia and Woody, but will family intrigue get in the way? Ride along for the wild trip that starts in a New York auction house and peaks in a mansion on Boston's Beacon Hill. The Dushane sisters finally get to the truth about their mother.
