Minnesota Prairie Roots

SEE THESE EYES? My second daughter claims they creep her out, that the eyes resemble those of a deranged person in a horror movie.

The horrible, horrible eyes.

Then look at these eyes. Nothing wrong with these brown beauties, she says.

The brown beauties.

Perhaps the hair style, the cut of the bangs, lends to her uneasiness, her favoring one face over the other.

Or possibly she finds the presence of numbers, bleeding through the translucent skin, rather disturbing, adding to the macabre element.

I’m not going to admit to her, not even hint, that I understand her viewpoint. I can’t. I won’t.

These are, after all, my masterpieces. I tediously, laboriously, carefully, proudly painted these ballerinas as a child from a paint-by-number kit.

My ballerinas, painted number by number.

Up until recently, these portraits had been stashed in a chest of drawers. But one day I decided the time had come to unveil my artwork. So I propped the old new art upon a dining room shelf.

I didn’t expect the men in the house to notice the change. If they did, they never uttered a word, not one single comment about the big-eyed ballerinas.

But my daughter, my second-born, who possesses an artistic side and, like me, is always observant of her surroundings, noticed.

I wish she’d kept her horrible opinion about the horrible eyes to herself. Now I can’t shake the feeling that the blue-eyed ballerina, prior to becoming a paint-by-number model, may have starred in a horror film.

The beautiful brown-eyed ballerina.

The horrifying ballerina with the frightening eyes, the fixating gaze.

© Copyright 2010 Audrey Kletscher Helbling