My Dad, in addition to his many and varied other achievements in his long, long life, was a Midwestern artist of some renown from the late ’60s to the mid ’80s. He had a reserved spot in the Iowa State Capitol where one of his paintings was always on display and he was President of the Eastern Iowa Arts Council for a while in the late ’60s. His paintings are a marvel; he did landscapes, closeups of forest life, wildflowers, and birds, and captured them with near-photographic detail.
He also looked at what people call “modern art” with mild disdain. I confess to having a streak of that disdain myself, but in this case, an art gallery in Wellington, New Zealand, has me thinking, well, you’ve got to hand it to them.
Perched on two fingers on the roof of an art gallery in Wellington, New Zealand, the giant sculpture of a hand has loomed over the city for five…
