Clara was four years old when she asked to sit up in my art van. I grimaced as I knew that was almost an impossibility. But she was an innocent child and did not know the hazards her request could bring about in a vehicle I found comfortable but others looked upon as a cluttered disaster zone.
I recalled one of my students had commented, “I’ve never seen anything like that.” She had glanced inside the side door van window just before a class session on a morning after a show weekend.
That student had joined others in a quiet art learning area where I taught oil painting techniques. For good reason, I had never considered teaching any student how to keep an art van loaded so that at any art show, I could mount from one to three booths each ten feet square with easels extending the space to the front and back. It was much easier to teach how to make black with Burnt Umber and Prussian blue with a touch of Alizarin Crimson.
Why try to explain that I lived in that van. For eighteen years I had been the Executive Gallery Director for a non-profit Gallery in Louisville, Kentucky. The impressive title meant I was responsible for keeping afloat, through good times and scarce, a viewing space for local artists and craftsmen.
We began that venue at The Cloister on Louisville, Kentucky’s East Chestnut Street when a grant afforded me the luxury of greeting viewers to a second-floor viewing space through the kindness of Ray Schumann. When the Cloister closed, our talented artists and craftsmen moved with me as guests of the City of Louisville to Founders Square across from The Cathedral of the Assumption.
Grants for operational expenses being in short supply, I enlisted the aid of volunteers to welcome viewers to our viewing area and I took to the road to teach oil painting classes in order to support keeping Gallery doors open. I ate lunches and suppers in that van on the way to oil painting sessions all across Louisville. That white van was as much my home as my local mailing address location.
Clara did not know me in the hectic days when I graduated from a station wagon up to a Volkswagen Campmobile. She met me when my white Ford Extended Cab Van was parked in an Elizabethtown driveway after I had finished an Art Show in the Main Post Exchange Parking Lot at Fort Knox, Kentucky. And that’s where she wanted to sit. Up in that van. Up in that fully loaded van.
So I slid open the side door of the Van, shifted my 75-foot electric cord stash, and shoved aside a small brouse box to clear an area for her to perch.
As I lifted her up into her viewing space her eyes became wide. She looked around with amazed wonder and uttered her memorable phrase, “The Most Stuff in the Whole World!”
I sometimes felt that way when packing up after some outdoor shows.
I do not have to close my eyes now to remember Clara’s excited comment. All I have to do is see a white van driving somewhere on a highway or parked outside a downtown building. Clara’s beaming face returns and I am back in the days when I lived with “The Most Stuff in the Whole World!”
It is a good memory and I am glad to have it and all the warm thoughts it brings with it along with the memories of those whose lives have touched mine when I used “The Most Stuff in the Whole World!”