The Power of Art Theme Analysis

Zachary worked by the light of a candle. As the carvings rose higher up the tree, he made them narrower and more convoluted in order to draw out the composition of each figure and scene so he would not run out of space before he ran out of mortal time, so that he would not complete a work at which he felt more and more he should finish his days laboring, dying as he etched the most elegant possible toes for a barefoot mother weeping for her child.

Bernard Richardson happened to be in the store one day and saw the postcards made from his photographs. He demanded Art Dunlop remove them.

Those are my pictures, they’re portraits of those people—and official documents, he said. They’re not for you to turn into a bunch of dirty jokes.

Art Dunlop stood behind the sales counter adding figures on a pad. He looked up and said, I guess you’re free to buy the lot if you care to. At retail.

Well, you don’t have my permission to—

Otherwise, you’re just about trespassing if you say anything more about it.

THE MORNING AFTER the feast, Ethan woke with bleary eyes and a slight headache from the beer. He took the small circle of mirror that had been his mother’s from its shelf near his father’s bed and sat on the rocks on the west side of the island and drew four self-portraits.

DO YOU MIND if I watch you draw? Bridget asked Ethan when, after a day spent mostly watching the mowers from just inside the opened barn doors (and stepping back out of view whenever Bridget came out to bring him food or to hang the laundry), he first ventured to the meadow and began sketching.

THE PAINTING WAS of a small, tidy bundle of asparagus, tied together with twine, placed on a dark stone tabletop, glowing under pure white light from somewhere above, ivory except at the tips, which blushed thistle-purple and pale green, as if just quickened into color by the lamp.

Here. He gave her his handkerchief and mixed the blood into the paint with a small brush. Look.

You do not need your paints anymore, Mr. Hale says. Leave them there and come with me.

This section of the State University’s exhibit commemorating the 100th Anniversary of the eviction of the settlers on Apple Island is devoted to the artwork of Ethan Honey. Honey was one of the last generation of native-born islanders (ca. 1897). He left behind dozens of competent—and informative—drawings of the people on the island and of daily life there at the end of its settlement. On loan from the estate of Ms. Phoebe Hale, of Enon, Massachusetts, where Honey briefly resided and practiced, are drawings of the summer hay mowing in July of 1913, the workers, the landscape, and the only three surviving paintings Honey made in oil: a large landscape depicting haystacks at sunset; a small, whimsically colored piece depicting a sop of green hay in an otherwise dry bale; and a portrait of a teenaged girl identified by Ms. Hale as Bridget Carney, an Irish immigrant who worked for the family as a domestic servant and Ms. Hale’s nanny for two years.

Zachary turned away and walked across the island toward where his house and the others were nearly done burning. The men from the mainland had missed Zachary’s tree so he went to it and got inside. He closed his eyes and ran the pads of his fingers across the carvings as if to decipher them by touch. He opened his eyes and followed the radius of each band of pictures. Really, they were crude. Most of the intricacies and nuances of expression and gesture and architecture and decoration had been those of his thoughts while he’d carved. Very little of the finesse of his ideas had made its way into the wood, he saw now. He gathered his candle and cross. He knelt and cupped up a cone of wood shavings and set it burning with his flint and steel. Smoke rose into the darkness of the hollowed trunk then refluxed and began pulsing from the opening. Zachary watched the fire grow until he was certain it would not smother, then headed for the water.

As the light left the sky, John Thorpe saw Zachary Hand to God wading away from the island across the channel, chest-deep in the water. Zachary held what looked like an old faded and patched flag bundled and knotted together by the corners above his head. His silhouette cut through the invisible current of the tide and to Thorpe he looked like a threadbare angel abandoning the wrecked ship over which he’d once been guardian, light fanning across the water behind him as he pushed against the incoming flood.