My house began as a family homestead that my grandpa bought and his children inherited. For decades it was a place expressly purposed to support the arts. Many people made music in its basement studio. I painted models in the parlor and hosted community art events on the spacious ground floor. The house has more recently become a place that's actively hostile to the arts, which is tragic.
Back in December, I wrote about some of the art drama going on at my house. At that time, my uncle D told me that the nudity in my oil paintings was offending a cousin who never visits, so the paintings had to be taken down. When I asked for clarification about exactly which pieces had suddenly become offensive, I was met with evasive weirdness.
Yesterday I met with my uncles B and D and got to the bottom of things. It turns out that my uncle B now wants my entire art collection off the walls. Instead of art, he literally just wants blank walls. My uncle D is a wet noodle who goes along with everything B says, so he's supporting the shift to a zero art household. Together, the pair owns over half of the house, which means nothing they want to do can be stopped.
For me, this means I now have to take tens of thousands of dollars worth of oil paintings down and put them in storage. Two years ago, my relatives did a lame remodeling project that forced me to get rid of half of my collection for lack of where to hang it. This work is now scattered across the walls and closets of dozens of friends and its condition is unknown. Now, the remainder of my collection must go into storage, where any one of a million things could end up damaging the work.
In the meeting, my uncle B claimed not to know that I made any money from my artwork, which was strange since painting was my primary income for many years and I'd held big art events at the house. B also compared my paintings to musical songs he had produced, making the point that his songs were financially worthless so my paintings must also be worth nothing. The obvious problem with his metaphor was that paintings have value as physical objects whereas songs are immaterial information.
Once upon a time, I lived in the attic of a big old Victorian house. My tiny room was just one fourth the size of the next smallest room in the house and I never got a parking spot, but the place accommodated my needs in other ways. The common area outside my room became my design studio. My uncle D encouraged me to fill the walls throughout the home's extensive other common areas with my art. An unused corner of garage became a little wood and metal shop, which I shared with a neighbor. And the backyard was turned from a trash heap to an oasis of healthy native plants and edibles.
One of the first things B did when he moved back in several years ago was eliminate my shop space and most garden beds. Since then, various questionable remodeling projects have been systematically eliminating common areas from the house. The music studio in the basement that had been there for decades was demolished and is now a pit of ragged concrete. The living room was walled off with cheap paneling and turned into private quarters. The second floor common area was cut in half to accommodate another of B's projects.
In light of this larger pattern, the elimination of art from my house is an unsurprising development. Once again my interests are being harmed by the bizarre choices of my relatives. They act like they're improving the property but everything they do makes the place worse, both in general and for me in particular. My biggest challenge in all of this is to not allow their nonsense to irreparably damage our relationships.
While I have no choice but to cooperate with the demands of my relatives and take down my art, I don't have to be happy about it. How I do feel is alienated by my family. Alienated, disappointed, and annoyed. And I fear that their crimes against good taste will continue ravaging our household.
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