oil on canvas · 1919 · n. brassard
a room with no one in it. the door at the back is closed. a small pale square on the wall — paler than the wall — marks where another painting used to hang, before whatever happened in 1919 happened.
brassard painted from an upper room in his own house. the room in the painting is also in his house, two floors below, and is now the kitchen. everything in it has been moved or replaced. only the nail in the wall is still there, where you cannot see it, behind a calendar.
field-note the painting that used to hang in the painted room was, by family tradition, a small landscape of an evening. it has not been located.