You surely shall have heard of the coming exhibition containing that modern piece of art by Fran Delanzo entitled Christ Today? Tut-huh! Hardly a work, I say, to suit hanging here the galleries of this worthy museum considering the lack of comfort on the eye. Many the disputed sigh given that work, yeah? Many the disgusted walk by for few sit and gaze then feel they leave with good feel factor. One wonders why no parental caution or at least notice saying - and from the start expect challenges. That deformed face like a headache cemented in, gaze on the canvas to long and migraines will spilt apart the virtue in you. However, I knew the model hung upon the wall, I knew his story and there was sanctity right in your face.
Bogardo Mac an t-Saoir, Joe, a chiselly fellow brought him up but the countenance of her who gave him birth, Maddie, was more divinely inspired. Blue and purple in birth, if not at Bogardo's conception, she smiled from her graced face and named him Bogardo. It came to her in a dream. Maddie smiled but the midwife felt moved to leave the room. Professional training kicked in, so she stayed wondering why the name of place near Aberlemno. And looking saw a Pictish cross of knobbed face, ploughed rigs of Angus red over blue-grey clay. A head-on car crash near Stracathro would struggle with to create form less challenging than Bogardo.
A face had he that in the real world could not work. It defied air-brushing or under-carpet-sweeping, the very concept of purgatory more acceptable than to attended that glob, greet it, with it talk to open your heart because no-way would you consider such scrub up to be pure with such surface-level challenge. Imagine the childhood of that hideously demanding creature as one of punishment for the world. Surely, you would proffer, the Virgin Mary would remind him the need of forgiveness from being born a brute into this world that laps up beauty hand and fist?
Chipping away at life, it helped Bogardo not to look into a mirror or cast a glance into a camera for they would only break. Not that he saw anything in himself to render that upset. Shop windows he never avoided, not to see himself but rather, glimpse the diaphanous forms fly by that he ached to reach. Frail beauties, as yourself, trapped in the here and now of others' opinion, they would never ask him for a prayer, for to do so might burn his image in their souls.
Ach, you get the point Bogardo Mac an t-Saoir, if that how you pronounced, is pig-ugly as some part of a pig not its face. Basically, wrong face in wrong place and definitely for a wrong time. Mind you, cast him back five-six hundred years into Renaissance times and his back-end-of-an-ass would have passed as any number of Madonnas with kippered faces slinking round the Skinnergate flogging urine as face cleanser. His trousers would have been the only giveaway but I digress. Even then, you could not portray him as a sunbeam and certainly no celestial child although, examine those art works discerningly and witness the damnation of an artist's problem painting a God into a quarter metre length of babe.
Fortunately, Bogardo lives in our darkened times. Fran Delanzo stopped him the in the street because of his unworldly appearance. Beholding that phizzog, she saw a pummelled-puss to which, a punch, a crunching of cartilage would bring improvement and she saw light in the eyes. Here was great detail of anatomy, intense passion, erotic-charge waiting to be moulded, desiring to be shaped in the image of her before him. Fran knew there no forgiveness if not shown others. Write, no way possible for her, tell and she would defile the truth there seen. She painted him in pain, on a cross and the world below as you will see when come the painting here. Then look carefully on the awkward pose lapped weightless in death across his mother, and see how the ugly knot presented for you to untie. In this art, a work beyond corruption of first spark now out there in the cosmos, is morphed-mug of minger-man here on Earth to which, Fran Delanzo managed to testify truth and beauty in his heavenly smile.
Ach, forget it, shudder, go on by, and don't come in so that by skipping light-hearted in your rebuttal, you will not have to tell the kids - we all live in out real worlds of own wondering where the bright-laugh is above us.
Scotfree2 Tales From Scotland Page 5