Bailey White's Thanksgiving Story: 'Call It Even'
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When he first came to live in Vermont, he thought in watercolor names: stumbling through a thicket of willows to come out at a swirl of water in the bend of a stream, he thought viridian green and cobalt blue; seeing the flanks of a row of Jersey cows in the dusty sunlight of the dairy barn at the Tunbridge Fair, he thought burnt sienna and Vandyke brown; the inky late afternoon shadows in the woods behind the Goodenough barn – Winsor green and alizarin crimson.
He had built a successful career for himself in Florida as a portrait painter, selling commissioned watercolor pictures of rich people's pretty little children, high society ladies, and fat businessmen whose jowls he slimmed with skillful shading. Then three things happened at once: He turned 60, the governor vetoed the state legislature's funding for public radio stations, and he was handed a certified check for $10,000 for a 3-by-4 foot painting of an ugly flat-faced black-and-white dog named Poochie.
"I'm getting old and fat," he told his agent. "It's my last chance. I want to paint in the open air — rocks, farm fields, the Green Mountains. I want to live in a state I can be proud of."
Source: NPR