We have recently added a new resident to our walls: a large, 43-inch-square painted canvas of a hot air balloon. Not the garish carnival kind, striped like a circus tent, nor the champagne-soaked fancy ones that bob over Napa Valley on travel brochures, but a more impressionistic rendering of balloon and countryside. A small cluster of silhouetted figures gathers beneath, gazing upward, as if waiting for some ascension or simply admiring what gravity will eventually reclaim.
We’ve decided not to show it here. Better to ambiguously describe it and let you fill in your own untitled rural balloon impression—if such a thing is possible. As our mothers liked to remind us, “Use your imagination!”
The painting is signed, or appears to be, by someone named Rhodes. Or perhaps Roles, at least according to an AI-assisted internet search that in its infinite wisdom insisted this was not a painting at all but a tourist rendering of the Greek island of Rhodes. WTF to that. (There is no whitewashed chapel, no cerulean sea, no olive grove—just balloon, sky, and people who look like they’ve wandered in from an Andrew Wyeth daydream.)
Beneath the signature are smudges that might be “66,” or maybe “86.” We lean toward “66” because there is something about the blue in that sky—a lighter, smudgier blue, definitely not the ubiquitous Baby Blue—that feels of another era. A “66 Blue,” if such a hue exists. God forbid it would be the 1966 Color of the Year. The same way avocado green and harvest gold feel inextricably shackled to the 1970s, there is a shade of blue that, if not invented, was at least perfected in the 1960s.
This blue jolted us back to graduate school, to a short story we abandoned called “Jesus Blue.” It was meant to be the recollection of a boy’s dislike for Sunday School (and the even more dreaded Vacation Bible School), as remembered by his older self. Forced to stare at those church-basement portraits of Our Dear Lord—body turned leftward, hands clasped dutifully, robes flowing gossamer around his almost ladylike frame—he developed an intense dislike of that shade of blue (as well as the Exact Same Pose that the Olin Mills photographer had insisted he make recently at the portrait studio). The color clung to the memory like the smell of a stinky sneaker, into which his sensitive young nose had recently been crammed by some locker-room bully. Workshop readers and others who read the piece all said the same thing about the title: “I know exactly that color!” If only the rest of the story had resonated as well.
This untitled painting, which we now call simply the Balloon Painting, is our latest acquisition (if modest folks such as ourselves can claim acquisitions). Some family members have “suggested” our tastes are leaning bougie. But that, we assure you, is a discussion for a later installment of Life On Snob Hill. So brace yourselves, dear family members, for a reckoning—one of those “this will hurt me more than it hurts you” moments (which we all knew then, and know now, was bullshit).
Still, the Balloon Painting embodies our intent to decorate with originals, one-of-a-kinds. We’ve never understood how people can gush, encouragingly, over a framed picture from Target (or its kin) when they have the exact same thing hanging in their own kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, or rumpus room (a term we know is out of favor, which is exactly why we trot it out, knowingly and winkingly (irony is such a dead art these days)). That’s just consumerism in action, reinforcing the idea that where you buy your stuff determines its worth. We bypass that by seeking out the singular. As Sook says in Capote’s “A Christmas Memory,” when a rich woman offers to buy Buddy’s and Sook’s freshly cut tree: “There’s never more than one of anything.”
Which is why we prefer art that insists on its own stubborn presence, even if it might not meet museum quality or deserve assessment by some precious, over-educated critic. The Balloon Painting is precisely that.
We weren’t looking for it. We were at an antique mall, browsing as one does—knowing full well that you rarely find the exact thing you’re hunting. (Case in point: we currently need a round mirror with an old gold frame for a tufted fabric coffee table. We swear antique malls used to be teeming with them, but now that we “need” one, not a single one in sight.)
Our son from L.A. was with us, and it was he who spotted the Balloon Painting. He said he’d passed by it several times, paused, and kept returning to it—it continued to “speak” to him. And when he showed us, we immediately agreed. But the size, oh the size. At 43 inches square, it wasn’t a casual commitment.
“But,” our son added, “if you buy it, I want it when you’re done with it.” Which, euphemistically, means: “When you die!” This from a man who, true to his new hometown, is more mid-century modern than Snob Hill’s genteel-poverty aesthetic. He’s also—shocking, shocking—on the hunt for the ultimate Velvet Elvis. That’s his cross to bear.
At this point we must admit to coyness. Because we weren’t considering the Balloon Painting for Snob Hill. We had, in fact, just bought a small house two hours south. Not an annex, not Snob Hill South. Family members (the bougie accusers) dubbed it “Your Second Property.” Until we can think of something better, we call it Golden Pond, for its location near a 40-acre lake. If we were honest, “Off Golden Pond” would be more accurate. No dock, but a kitchen window view of a corner of the lake and hills that more than compensate.
Golden Pond has high-peaked walls—something Snob Hill sorely lacks. One wall was waiting for a painting with lift. The Balloon Painting had upward movement swirled into it. Even in the antique mall, price tag slashed to a sale figure, we knew exactly where it belonged. Call it kismet—just not Kottage Kismet.
Now installed, the Balloon Painting belongs. We find ourselves pausing before it, letting the eye travel upward, catching new gestures of color, noticing overlooked edges and brushstrokes.
And yet, our attention lingers on the signature: Rhodes. Who was Painter Rhodes? The search so far has been fruitless. We may never know. And yet Rhodes painted with enough clarity and restraint to release this image into the world—optimistic, balanced, and a little ambiguous. Which, come to think of it, isn’t unlike parenting. We raised two sons, launched them upward our own little DNA satellites, and still enjoy (most of the time) watching them float across our sky. This is what we mean by living Off Golden Pond.
We’re reminded here of another painting—one inherited from a grandmother who claimed she bought it at London’s Thieves’ Market just after the war. She liked it because it depicted a mother watching her young son play with a ball. An echo, perhaps, of all those Madonna-and-child knockoffs (so many of them sentimental dreck). Its mystery signature eluded us, until Antiques Roadshow cracked the code with an insider database and valued it at approximately $800. “Next!” they said, ushering us along. It still hangs in our living room. Had it been less good, it would have been exiled to a lesser room at Snob Hill. Thankfully, one grandmother had style.
We enjoy living with the Balloon Painting and anticipate doing so for as long as we’re stewards of it. That’s how it should be. The best advice we’ve heard about buying art isn’t to treat it as an investment but as a source of enduring pleasure. The Balloon Painting delivers, at a fraction of the cost of anything you’ll find in a glossy catalog. That’s terrific ROI. Some art we’ll keep only for a time before releasing it back “into the wild,” as someone surely did with this piece. And we’re comforted that this one will live on for at least another generation in our family.
That’s legacy, with a capital L. Off Golden Pond, that feels close enough to Dylan’s promise—not when he paints his masterpiece, but when we hang ours. And yes, we can’t help ourselves: another tune drifts in—“Up, Up and Away,” the Fifth Dimension reminding us that, balloon or not, levity is always part of the lift.
P.S. Our search for Painter Rhodes continued after this blog was published, and turned up a likely match: Mickey Rhodes (1936–1982), a Missouri painter active in the mid-20th century. His canvases—Riverboat, 1966 and Factory on Riverfront, among others—still surface at St. Louis auction houses, trading quietly in the secondary market. So yes, Mickey Rhodes existed, brush in hand, right here in Missouri. Which means the Balloon Painting carries more than charm; it belongs to a modest but genuine strand of St. Louis’s 20th-century art legacy—now improbably extended to Snob Hill (and Off Golden Pond).