When I was growing up, my family’s house was a museum of my father’s works — striking mixed media images, beautifully framed, and each making a vibrant and powerful statement from the wall where it hung. All of his artwork of this type pre-dated my 1969 birth; when I was a kid, he was working on photic paintings and his medical illustration career.
Our house also held a big art secret, “the paintings in the bed.” My parents’ bed was a wooden plank with a foam mattress, held aloft by a custom-made wooden frame my Dad built.
I heard that he stored paintings under the bed, and that made me curious. I asked about them and was told that I’d get to see them sometime, but it was a hassle. The more I heard about the challenge, the more I became certain it would be a monumental feat. Perhaps the bed top weighed so much that four big men would be needed to move it? Or maybe it took custom tools that had to be specially ordered? I stopped asking and largely forgot about this mystery, until after my father died last Christmas. I wondered then – were those paintings still there?
A couple of months after he passed away, I was organizing papers and files in the bedroom and got the bed top clear for the first time. I looked under to see how the bed and base were attached and was surprised to see no hardware. I pushed the top – it was indeed quite heavy – and found it was not bolted down. I pushed more, and saw art! I tilted the bed top, and it slanted and then slid heavily toward the floor. I eagerly dove into the treasure trove below, and I found more than 20 paintings, only slightly dusty, carefully packed, and well preserved there.
Atop the pile, perhaps by coincidence or perhaps for documentation, was a copy of the Saturday Evening Post from 1978. My father was 50, I was in the third grade, and Jimmy Carter was president when the bed may last have been opened forty years ago!
The artwork is all unframed. Some of it is similar to other pieces from the period he was active, largely 1957-1962. A few pieces are totally different from his other work, notably a fantastical tree and a scene with people who look to be protesters.
I am pretty confident that I was the first person to lay eyes on my father’s lost works in four decades. Now you can see them too. Hopefully I will be able to organize an actual exhibit in the near future.
An interesting and diverse group of paintings, eh? What do you see in them? Which is your favorite? What’s under your bed?
ThackerayArt.com 