There was something nearly surreal about seeing a scruffily clad thirty-something with multi-coloured dreadlocks and pierced eyebrows, sitting in the clinically clean, white and chrome minimalist art gallery, reading a chunky paperback copy of Richard Webster’s ‘Why Freud Was Wrong.’ 

Maybe the cream canvas and chrome pseudo-deckchairs were more comfortable than they looked and the gallery more quiet than the library.  Or maybe its curators were more tolerant of non-conformist aging members of teenage subcultures than the average middle aged, middle classed, Women’s Institute attending librarians who no doubt would watch him uneasily, convinced that he would steal books, or perhaps fart loudly offending all those “normal” people whose stomachs simply refused to ingest air.

Totally engrossed in his book, he didn’t raise his head.  The well dressed woman flicked through the catalogue, reading the name and price of each painting, stopping and studying each one meticulously; giving each work the respect it was due.

The style was a little “Dali”, but more minimalist and abstract somehow.  Dali’s work was full of detail, perspective, imagination and illusion.  These were less full…..Big paintings with a lot of space in them.  The brushstrokes were broad and loose, quite impressionistic yet not filling the canvas with that explosion of light which flooded the works of artists such as Monet, Manet and Seurat.  Little was happening in the paintings yet this wasn’t a fault in them.  Rather, it created a tension, an expectation of something about to happen or the hint that something deeply symbolic was being hidden or disguised and just waiting to be discovered.

She stood contemplating the meaning of a triangular canvas with a desert background and a green Michaelangelo’s David to the right, on its long vertical side.  The statue had a heart shaped hole through its chest revealing the desert sky.  At the equilateral point on the left of the canvas was a cactus.  At least, she thought that was what it was.  The obscure khaki brush strokes, from the distance, were slightly phallic and she worried that the scruffy reader may have thought the same.  She resisted the temptation to examine the object closer in case he piped up with “It’s a prick,” or something cruder.