The Singing Painting

Sometime last year, while looking through Bed Bath and Beyond for something or other, my mom saw a print of a painting that she instantly fell in love with. The print was pretty expensive, so she didn't buy it, but later that week she showed me the painting, and I gave her my blessing (such that it is) to buy it.

The painting my mom saw is called The Singing Butler, and it was one of the first pieces done by contemporary Scottish painter Jack Vettriano. He was around thirty when he painting this particular piece, and apparently he had very little experience painting.

What makes the painting so memorable, however, isn't the backstory, but the images. It's very minimalistic, but with little understanding of who the characters are, the viewer can still see exactly what's going on.

I've never had much love for paintings or other similar visual artwork. Certain pieces appeal to me, sure, but I've never understood why a weird Picasso or boring Pollock would ever sell for more money than something worthwhile, like this or this. Anyone can put paint onto a canvas; it takes real skill to create something that not only looks good, but means something as well.

That's why The Singing Butler appealed to me. It's not my new favorite painting ever, but it does what I think all paintings should to; it tells a story, and for that it earns my respect.

Mom wanted to buy the print she found at Bed Bath and Beyond, but it was too expensive for impulse, and when she finally made up her mind and went back, it was gone. It was on her mind for a while after that, and a few months ago, while making our once-a-fortnight visit to Barnes and Noble, she noticed a large 1,000 piece puzzle version of it for ten bucks.

She bought it, of course, and we broke the puzzle open that night, setting out a large white board to work on and dividing all the pieces into bowls. We don't do a lot of jigsaw puzzles in our house, and when we do, they're never glued together to hang up, but there was an unspoken understanding that this ten dollar jigsaw puzzle would look just as good on our walls as an expensive print.

We worked on the puzzle this summer while watching TV, because that's how we roll in this house. I divided out all the edge pieces, and while mom put them together I separated the different colored pieces (the reds, the pure blacks, the sandy beach and the gray cloud) into different glass bowls.

I can't say exactly how long it took us to work on that puzzle. We'd sit down together when something was on, and occasionally I'd work on it as I waited to leave for class a so forth. Little by little we got pieces placed in, until eventually the puzzle looked like this:

This presented two problems. First, it meant that all the leftover pieces (the cloud pieces) looked more or less the same. Even though there weren't as many pieces remaining, it would probably take just as long to finish the puzzle as it did to get to this point.

The other problem, however, was when mom sat back, looked at what we had so far, and said something to the effect of "I like it. We should frame it just like this."

I insisted that we at least finish the puzzle before mom framed it, incomplete. The point of the puzzle is to finish it, I thought, and it made no sense to pay ten bucks and frame it incomplete, just because it looks 'artsy'. I thought that, with the time it took to finish it, and seeing it finally complete, mom might change her mind and frame the completed puzzle.

It did in fact take us a long time to complete. Each remaining piece had to be measured by the slight tint differences in the clouds and the shape of the existing pieces, and when we got a single piece fitted in, we had to go through the process all over again.

I finally put the last two pieces in, leaving the completed puzzle on the table for mom to find later. She was still talking about removing the cloud pieces to hang the incomplete 'artsy' painting, but we left on our vacation soon afterward and nothing was done with the puzzle for a while.

I'm telling you guys all about this because, finally, mom did something with the puzzle. To be precise, she removed a few of the pieces, and glued what was left to a large board. She didn't remove as many as I was afraid she would, and it does look a bit artsy, so I guess it's all good. The puzzle hasn't been framed yet (that's expensive), but it looks like it will be soon, and the whole ordeal will be over.