A Cafe and a Painting

This little cafe is located not too far from us, and Dave and I have been there on a few occasions. It's a no-frills place where you can get lots of breakfast and lunch items. I took the photo above in 2018.

When I went walking with my stepmother's camera a couple of months ago, I came across a renovation project at the cafe. The entire shopfront had been removed. I didn't even know such a thing was possible, but as you can see, there's basically no front wall in that picture. I guess it's mostly window so it's not like it's load-bearing, but still -- I don't often see shops opened up entirely like that.

Finally, yesterday, while walking Bailey past this spot, I had a chance to photograph the new shopfront. It's never very easy to shoot because if there aren't a bunch of cars parked in front -- it's on a very busy street -- then there are people sitting outside. But it was closed Sunday morning, so the time was right.

I wonder how much a shopfront costs?

Anyway, as you can tell, I don't have much to say about yesterday. I spent most of the day reading on the new garden bench. I've made quite a lot of headway in my Thom Gunn book and I expect to continue with it today. I took the dog for a couple of walks and video-chatted with Dave. Bailey has developed a limp, and I have no idea why -- my guess is she hurt her right front foot in the garden, lunging through thorny undergrowth in her endless quest for a squirrel. There's no visible injury. I hope I don't need to take her to the vet to get that sorted!

Here's another flight of fancy that my brain went on this week. This painting used to hang in our dining room when I was growing up as a kid. And I mean it hung there for years -- through my early childhood when my parents were still married, through their divorce and all the way through my middle and high school years -- and my younger brother's too. It wasn't a real painting -- just a department store print. I think my mom and dad bought it at Montgomery Ward in Floriland Mall around the time they built our house in the mid-'60s. Over time it got kind of yellowed and spiders took up residence behind the frame, and my mom finally threw it out in the late '80s.

I didn't love this painting. In fact I always thought that weird log or clump of rocks or whatever -- projecting into the lake -- looked like an alligator, so it was a little creepy to me. But I got to wondering about it. What was the artist's backstory? What was it called? Where is the original these days?

I had the photo above, which I cropped from an old picture of my dad sitting at our dining room table. And I remembered that it was signed Robert Wood. So I did some Googling and came up with another person who had an identical painting, and someone rather optimistically selling one on Craigslist for $95 (!).

Robert William Wood, it turns out, was an English painter who immigrated to America as a young man. He lived all over the country and painted quite prolifically, and his paintings were then commercially printed and sold millions of copies. He was the quintessential painter of mid-century "sofa art."

The one we had is known as "Mystic Pond," and it's similar to several others that Wood painted with autumn and/or pond themes. In fact it looks like he returned to the same spot several times, but this is the only one I've seen in which that alligator-shaped promontory is so prominent. I could find no information about Wood's original painting, when he painted it or where it might be now.

Wood died in 1979 at age 90, and he was already well into his '70s by the time my parents hung this in our dining room. I wonder how much money he made from licensing his artworks to commercial publishers? Wouldn't it be strangely wonderful and fulfilling to be a painter and have your work hanging in homes all over the country? (And being talked about on blogs 50 years later!)