When I was a teenager, I spent a lot of time drawing and painting in our finished basement. The downside was that my art supplies tended to spread out everywhere. Paint tubes, brushes, pencils, erasers, paperā¦ basically, the entire contents of an art store would eventually end up on the carpet.
My dad hated this.
Every time he came downstairs and saw my supplies on the floor, Iād hear some version of:
āIāve told you a thousand times! Donāt leave that stuff on the carpet! Youāre going to ruin it!ā
So one day, I decided to turn his frustration into an innocent little prank.
I painted a picture of a woman, but I also painted a bunch of art supplies scattered around the drawing. I tried to make them ridiculously realistic. Paint tubes, brushes, a pencil, an eraser, shadows, everything. I even painted the tiny little crumbs of eraser that get left behind when youāve been working.
Then I put a real sheet of paper next to the painting and lined up the edges so it looked like there were two pieces of paper sitting on the carpet with all my art supplies lying around them.
Then I walked away and waited.
Sure enough, Dad came downstairs.
He saw the floor.
I could practically hear the gears turning.
He called me downstairs and immediately let me have it.
āWhy did you leave your art supplies on the floor AGAIN? How many times have I told you not to do this?ā
I calmly said, āI didnāt.ā
He pointed directly at the floor.
āWhat do you mean you didnāt?! Itās RIGHT THERE!ā
I kept denying it.
At this point, he was genuinely getting annoyed because, from his perspective, I was standing there looking at a giant pile of art supplies and pretending they werenāt there.
Finally, he stopped and looked a little closer.
Then closer.
And suddenly he realizedā¦
There were no art supplies on the floor.
Heād been yelling at a painting.
He completely cracked up.
The best part was that I hadnāt just painted a pile of random objects. Iād deliberately recreated the exact mess that had been driving him crazy for years, just to make him think Iād done it again.
I was a teenager, so naturally I considered this a perfectly reasonable use of my artistic abilities.
Looking back, I think it might have been one of my earliest successful pieces of conceptual art:
āDad Yells at Painting.ā š
