When I was a student, sometimes I used to study in one the Student Union lounges. My favorite was rarely occupied and it was tastefully furnished in overstuffed furniture, carpeting and wood paneling. There were no tables, which probably explained why so few other students used it, but when I needed to spread out a lot of books I usually retreated to the coffee shop where I could drink and smoke. The room was dark, almost as dark as a classy bar, except for lamps by each chair. There were three paintings on the walls, large canvasses, each illuminated by a single spotlight just big enough and far away to show it clearly.

Two of the paintings were signed by Rachel Register. I never met her but I knew her by reputation, she was a well-respected local artist. Her style was easily identifiable, meticulousy accurate and detailed, almost photographically correct, but her subjects were always still lifes of totally unrelated and contrasting objects painted in garish day-glo colors. The one behind my favorite chair was of an anatomically correct human heart held up in triumph by a surgeon's rubber-gloved hand, the way the Statue of Liberty holds up her torch. The local legend was that it had been painted in honor of the doctor that had saved her mother's life. In spite of the bizarre colors, it looked as if it could start beating at any moment. It didn't fit in with contemporary artistic styles or subject matter, but it had an emotional impact to it that was unmistakeable.

The other I used to call Rhinocerous With Tomatoes, which described it succintly. It was a frame-filling and incredibly detailed likeness of a rhinocerous, walking out of the frame and so true to life you could see every wrinkle, every bristle, every groove in its horn. Superimposed on this image was the mandala of a sliced tomato, just what you see if you cut a big one for your salad with a very sharp blade, at right angles to the axis defined by the stem. Every curlicue and shape, each indentation of the fruit's internal anatomy down to the seeds, precisely delineated. The colors were multiple shades of psychedelic red and purple, totally unrealistic in the way it contrasted with the careful craftsmanship of the linework. And then there was the juxtaposition of the rough, brutish creature and the snowflake symmetry of the vegetable. It had a whimsical edge to it I admired. It worked, although there is no way to describe verbally how or why.

Ah, but the third painting--it was special. It was by a different artist, signed, but the name was an illegible scrawl. It hung opposite my favorite chair and I saw it each time I looked up from Greek letters and abstract symbols on the page in front of me. It was an abstraction, a formless chaotic mass of thick acrylics in earth tones, heaps of paint smeared on the canvas, from near black to an off-beige, dark reds and browns. I looked like the turbulent heart of the primal nebula, form emerging out of the void. Normally I don't care for abstractions, they are just white noise, random clutter, pretentious nonsense. But this one gripped me, it was fascinating, troubling, eternal all at once. The pigments were so thick it had a texture to it, like a paper-maché sand table of a battlefield, or a 3D geological model of plutonic magma rising through the crust of the earth. I would not have changed any of it, any alteration would have ruined the compositon, the balance, the way it hung together...just...right. It was someone's masterpiece, I wonder if the artist fully realized what he had accomplished.

And I often wondered who was the person who had selected those paintings and acquired them for that room, and if they realized what they had accomplished.