The Good Life

The current display at our local art gallery about a mile down the road might be entitled, “Summer Frivolity.”    I invite you to accompany me for a vicarious viewing.

First, forget any image you might have of a typical studio with spotlighted masterpieces and carefully positioned benches to encourage contemplation.  This is an open-air gallery featuring of freehand chalk drawings on the road.

Now.  Ready?  If you were to walk this stretch, you would first encounter a genderless fisherman, or rather the ghost of one, with a ghostly white fish on the line.

Next, you’d discover two smiling girls poised amid flowers, one holding a cluster of balloons, the other on-the-run.

And finally, you would no doubt marvel at my favorite: a panting runner with hair standing straight up, advertising a “toot!”

These drawings, and others of an oversized orange ice cream cone surrounded by orange flowers and butterflies, stand alone on the quiet, less-traveled fork of the road like horizontal billboards advertising youth’s lightheartedness. I unfortunately have not been privileged to meet the artists.  But their works speak for them: life is good.