Art Appraisal
[Art Appraisal by Gonner Maude begins with this:] My mother took me aside one morning and told me my father had gone crazy. I was seven at the time. In her defense she was pretty gentle about it. 'Your Dad's okay. He's just gone crazy is all.' When I asked her if crazy meant he'd locked himself in his study again to paint for three days, she told me no, he'd attacked her with a sharpened paintbrush. She said it just like that. Matter of fact. No tears in sight. They had been married six years, tying the knot one year after Mum pushed me out between her legs in a garden shed in the boonies outside Waterdeep. Art is a funny thing. Mitcher and Webson tell us in their excellent breakdown of the craft that good art replicates life whilst great art overcomes life. That morning, at seven years old with unlaced shoes and a friction burn on my butt from scooting too fast across the floor, I learned the truth of that, and its corollary: that while overcoming that strange thing called life, great art can gobble it up just as easily