Midst Cool and Silence

More about Midst Cool and Silence

The painting in the image is attributed to Alois Arnegger and is titled Midst Cool and Silence. Arnegger was Austrian and spent time around Naples and the Amalfi Coast, though I’m not convinced he actually painted these landscapes directly from life. My suspicion is that he assembled them from fragments—elements remembered or borrowed from other places—back in the studio, which was probably located in one of the seedier parts of town.

I don’t know whether he ever crossed paths with our local hero and beach bum, Rafito el Varado, but I like to imagine some faint overlap in spirit, if not in geography.

The children in the photograph are me and my cousin Tommy. Tommy was a funny little kid, probably around seven years old. At some point they put him on one of those kid leashes, which felt excessive—especially since he already had the look of a bulldog, and was quite scrappy in a scary kind of way. Still, I liked him a lot. He later turned out to be a pyromaniac. We used to build flamethrowers and stage machete fight-club battles.

The painting itself was something my mom found at a St. Vincent de Paul thrift store. I don’t think she knew or cared who the artist was. It probably just reminded her of somewhere exotic—Italy, maybe, or Monterey, California. To her, it could have been either. She had no idea about Arnegger, or about heroes of any kind.

The image I worked from came out of a home movie my dad made, shot in our living room. I pulled a still from it and brought it into a photo-editing program. There, I discovered two mirrored sides of the same image, stitched them together, and ran the result through a reverse image search. That’s how I eventually landed on the artist’s name. Years earlier, I had tried the same thing and found nothing at all.

Sometimes the image waits for you to learn how to look at it properly.