Alex looked on, astonished as the living room transformed before his very eyes. A woman he’d seen on occasion was busily painting the walls with broad strokes of a rolling brush. Dip. Roll. Dip. Roll. Within minutes, almost the entire wall was a new color.
Alex was astonished because only a few months prior he’d tried his hand at painting on the walls and gotten scolded. It was a colorful combination of orange crayon, a glitter pen, and various pencil marks, culminating in what he considered to be a wonderful abstraction detailing his relationship with the universe.
His parents were not happy, scrubbed the art off the walls, and Alex lost his crayon privileges for a week.
Amelia’s explorations in food art had met a similar response. They both thought her Rage in Spaghetti Sauce to be an excellent representation of the trials and tribulations often experienced by a pre-adolescent testing the boundaries of parental tolerance.
Instead, more scrubbing and no dessert that night.
Alex had presumed that his parents were simply culturally inert, incapable of appreciating the walls for the canvases that they were. He was ready to populate them with wonderful creations that they need only put the frame around. It’s easier than hanging something up!
And yet, now, they’re letting an adult paint not just a little part of the wall, but the entire thing! Moreover, they moved the furniture to make it easier. The entire wall was getting painting in a single color, which didn’t strike Alex or Amelia as especially vogue. Parents just don’t get art.
CASE: UNSOLVED
