The Hurricane Sisters by Dorothea Benton Frank Page B

mankind ever produced fifty years ago, and now it was splattered with every color found in nature or not—my homage to Jackson Pollock.
    But hey! It actually looked like an artist’s studio! The living room held a huge piece of half-inch plywood laid over two old sawhorses where I stretched my canvases over frames and prepped them with two or three coats of gesso, depending on the quality of the muslin or the texture of the material I was using. It was just way cheaper to make my own than to buy them already finished. And this way I could put together canvases of unconventional sizes and textures too. I mean, I could paint on denim or burlap. How to stretch a canvas was probably one of the most practical things I learned in college besides how to stretch a dollar.
    Anyway, in the back of the cottage there was an old tin sink where I could clean brushes and a creepy bathroom if I was desperado. In the other little room, where they probably kept pantry items and so forth back in the day, I stored my paintings in open vertical bins made of two-by-fours just in case David Zwirner’s or Larry Gagosian’s car broke down in front of our house and they needed shelter. In case you’ve never heard of them, they own some of the most amazing galleries in Chelsea, if not on the whole planet. They’d say, So, young lady, what do you do here on Sullivans Island to pass the time? And I’d say, Well, I like to paint . And then they’d say something like What a coincidence! We’re art dealers. In New York! I’d whip out all my canvases and give them a cultural experience they’d never forget. They’d beg to represent me and fly me and all my paintings off to New York. There I’d have a one-woman show that would astound the press and everybody in the art world and I’d be an overnight sensation.
    Maybe not.
    Ah, let the girl have her dreams. I know, I know. Pretty over the top. Oh well.
    Most of my current paintings were landscapes. I envisioned them in bold colors and sometimes painted them on other materials like seersucker or denim for texture and dimension. But I loved figurative painting too. For the pure fun of it, I’d been working on a portrait of Maisie as Mona Lisa, complete with that all-knowing smile. I loved taking people I knew and dropping them into a context that said who they were. And instead of having the pastoral background that da Vinci used in his painting, I painted a landscape with a llama. It was so Maisie. She’d get a hoot out of it if she ever saw it. Unfortunately, since the day the Impossibles confiscated her car keys, she rarely came out to the beach anymore. Maybe one day I’d surprise her with it. Meanwhile, it hung on my bedroom wall.
    And I had a painting I did of Ivy as a little tiny boy, sitting all alone on the steps of a giant brick building, sort of like him in a big cold world. I used to worry about how he kept so much to himself. Our parents were really terrible to him when he came out. In fact, he didn’t even have the chance to come out as gay before they packed him off to that horrible camp. The camp made him believe he was a sinner bound straight for the fires of hell if he didn’t go straight. How was he supposed to do that? When he came home, he wouldn’t talk to anyone for months. All he did was stay in his room and cry. But eventually he got angry enough to rebel and he went back to normal—his normal. And my parents allegedly apologized to him but holy crap, there was a lot of damage already done. Their disappointment in Ivy was so obvious. I just kept telling him that they were dead wrong, that it was like hating your child for having kinky hair or one blue eye or some other thing that the child was born with. And while we’re being honest, who wanted to be like Clayton and Liz anyway? Amen to that.
    Oh, Ivy! My sweet brother! One of the first paintings I ever did was a small acrylic of us playing on the beach when we were children. I copied the composition from an old