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copyright ©1999-2002 |
Last Saturday, while on a weekend getaway to celebrate our first wedding anniversary, my boy and I, we fell in love at first sight. Not with each other – that falling happened long, long ago, and after many, many sights – but with a gorgeous eight-and-a-half-foot-tall beauty that we spied while wandering aimlessly, innocently through the small shops and tiny galleries of Bisbee, AZ. This particular beauty happened to be hanging proudly on the tall white walls of a gallery just off the main drag. A big, bold, mixed-media diptych titled Urban Cowgirls, painted by a local artist named William Spencer III. It was beautiful, and enigmatic, and fascinating — a total surprise — and when we saw it we just had to stop and stare. Bisbee, a lovingly-restored old copper mining town nestled in the mountains of southern Arizona, is quaint and charming, full of infectiously friendly local townsfolk who are both quite obviously very content to be living where they are, and seemingly happy to share their town with the many weekend tourists as well. It is a very pleasant place to be, but it is not the sort of place I visit expecting to buy anything substantial – perhaps a souvenir "antique", some kitschy memento at most. The antique shops are fun but overpriced; the galleries are affordable but largely unimpressive. There are plenty of things sold as art here, sure, but it’s largely of the cheesy Southwest, pastel-earth-tones, cacti- and cowboys- and Indians- themed variety, the vast majority of it so bad as to make me cringe in embarrassment for the poor folks trying to make a living off such meager talents. We were not expecting to find any art there that we liked; we were certainly not in Bisbee to buy art. Poor twenty-somethings that we are, the boy and I aren’t much in the habit of ever buying art really, preferring, instead, to populate our walls with things priced to suit our miniscule budget. That by-and-large means free, like my photographs and his textural-art projects, and miscellaneous other lovely things made and gifted to us by people we know. This method has worked well for us: our walls are jam-packed with neat stuff to look at. We’ve been lucky enough to avoid Bare Wall Syndrome, that most common of young homeowner maladies. We have more artwork than we have wall space. We do not, in short, need more art.
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