excerpt
same feeling about you as I had about where that puck would be.”
“I want to help you,” he said one day over lunch.
“I’d appreciate all the help I can get,” Ken said. “There hasn’t been a
helluva a lot of it at this point.”
“Yes, so I gather.”
Virgil Pires, a tall Portuguese man, became another frequent visitor.
“You come from my country,” he said when he introduced himself.
“You’re almost Portuguese. I love what is in the papers and on TV. You
talk about my country with so much love.
“I wasn’t born in Portugal,” Ken said. “But I think that part of my soul
is Portuguese.”
The collection of paintings for the show grew, most of them featuring
an Inukshuk standing sentinel over the stark Arctic landscape. Irving and
Virgil visited almost daily, moving the paintings around, discussing the
merits of each one, and arguing about who should purchase which. Virgil
liked to say proudly, “He’s Portuguese, you know.”
Irving argued, “Portuguese, my ass. He’s no more Portuguese than
I am. He’s a mongrel – Danish, Irish, Spanish, French, Italian, Jewish
grandmothers, Christian grandfathers – grew up in Portugal – I tell you,
he’s a mongrel!”
“Oh no!” Virgil protested. “This is brilliant! This is magnificent! It was
written in heaven! This man has a place in heaven!”
Ken painted, working in a world he was entering for the first time.
These visions of the Arctic had been bottled up inside him for years, and
a great dam had burst open, spilling out a Niagara of creativity. The faster
he painted, the more powerful the pictures.
The week before the show, Irving and Virgil began to choose the paintings
they wanted, arguing good-naturedly over several of them. “You
can’t have them all,” Ken said. “You can only have twenty paintings!”
“Between us or each?” Virgil asked.
Were they serious? Ken wondered, beginning to feel excited. “Each,”
Ken said.
He had completed ninety-six canvases. Virgil and Irving fell on them
with the glee of schoolboys who had just been told they could choose a
dozen of any sort of candy in the store. They argued, talked, and wrangled
possessively over one or two of the larger paintings, until each had a
pile of twenty. “How much?” they wanted to know.
Ken forced his voice to remain calm. He studied each painting and methodically
wrote the price on a slip of paper. The forty canvases totalled
eighty-five thousand dollars.
Neither man flinched. Instead, they insisted on a celebration, and over
a bottle of good wine, Ken explained that their paintings would be part of
the exhibit – and he recalled one of Alex Fraser’s pieces of advice.
Manolis Aligizakis 