Essays in Idleness

A most exhilarating spectacle came to me, on a card sent by a couple in Dunrobin, Ontario. I am privileged to receive not only generous donations, for my idleness, but often, to find the cheques and money orders enclosed in beautiful cards and letters. This one contained a watercolour reproduction, “Serene Bay,” by the California painter, Dennis A. Francesconi.

He became a mouth painter in response to a terrible water-skiing accident, which left him “C-5” quadriplegic at age seventeen. But dissatisfied with his “mobility issues,” and without use of his hands, he decided to master penmanship by mouth. Then he took up drawing. His artist-wife Kristi comes into this somehow, and his extraordinary sense of colour seems to have found itself. He also removed himself from public support.

Thanks to the Internet, I quickly learnt about him and about the Association of Mouth and Foot Painting Artists. It is an association that itself inspires, consisting of people making original works of beauty, rather than just whining for money. At their website one may review a catalogue of other such painters, in India, especially, and in almost every other country.

Dennis writes that by helping others in similar situations, “one begins to truly understand why all of this has happened in the first place.”