Barnhardt: Painting casts mysterious spell

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Barnhardt: Painting casts mysterious spell

MADISON — Five years ago, Danny Farmer walked into an art gallery on Battleground Avenue in Greensboro looking for something to hang over his fireplace.

That’s when he says a painting "spoke" to him.

Of course, he was speaking metaphorically. Not many things speak to Farmer, at least not so that he can hear them. Born deaf, he lives in a silent world and communicates by reading lips and signing.

"As soon as I came in the door, the picture grabbed my eye," says Farmer, who is 44. To most, the oil painting of a young girl reaching for a flower is a beautiful painting. But to Farmer, it’s much more — and he’s not even sure why.

The painting had him in its grip.

Five years later, it still does.

The oil painting has become something of a mystery. Farmer can’t find information about the artist, and now there’s a new twist to the puzzle — people are seeing images in the swirling, brush strokes.

Farmer, who lives in Madison, says when he first walked into the art shop five years ago, he couldn’t stop looking at the oil painting in the ornate gold frame, but the price — a little more than $600 — was going to take a hefty toll on his budget. He left without it.

But he couldn’t quit thinking about the painting. After a restless night, he headed to the bank the next morning, withdrew the money and purchased it.

But owning it wasn’t enough.

Farmer felt driven to learn more about the work of art.

The woman who sold him the painting told him that her father, an art dealer in New York, purchased it in England in the 1940s.

With only that to go on, and the signature "S. Edmund" in the bottom corner of the painting, Farmer hit the Internet, trying to unearth something that would satisfy his overwhelming, almost compulsive curiosity.

In the meantime, the painting continued to weave its spell on others. People who visited him were drawn to it.

Three years ago, when moving from a home in Winston-Salem back to Madison, Farmer propped the painting on his porch while he loaded a truck with furniture. A man driving by in a Jaguar spotted the painting, turned his car around, parked, walked straight to the porch and gazed at the painting in silence.

"For 15 minutes, he stared at the picture," says Farmer, who grew uneasy with the man’s attention. Finally, the man asked Farmer if he’d sell it. Farmer refused repeatedly, growing nervous from the man’s persistence and frustrated about his difficulty in communicating.

Farmer put the painting in the front seat of the truck and drove away, leaving the man standing on the porch. When he returned to pack more belongings, there was a note on the door. The man left his contact information, asking Farmer to call him if he ever decided to sell the painting.

Two more years went by.

Farmer, who used to work at the Greensboro post office before becoming eligible for a medical disability, spent countless hours searching the Internet fruitlessly for information about the artist.

And then, three months ago, someone else fell prey to the painting’s mesmerizing quality.

Farmer’s friend Billy Louns-bury, who is a decorator, became intrigued by the painting. Farmer, exasperated by his futile search for information, had taken to praying for help to learn more about the painting.

And coincidentally, that’s when Lounsbury saw something in the painting that no one else had — a face emerged very near the little girl’s outreached hand.

When Lounsbury pointed it out, Farmer saw it, too. It’s faint, almost a shadow, about the size of a silver dollar.

He grabbed his digital camera and snapped several photos, eager to examine the image close up. But when he looked at it on his computer screen, he saw not one face, but two.

When prompted where to look, others were seeing the faces, too. There was also a growing consensus that one of the faces looked a lot like images of Jesus, and the other bore great resemblance to portrayals of the Virgin Mary.

Farmer headed to Three Points Gallery, where he had bought the painting, hoping to ask the proprietor if she had ever seen the faces. The business was no longer there.

A few weeks ago, he took photos of the painting to the Antiques Extravaganza in Winston-Salem. There, an antiques dealer, John Hall, president of Odessa Corp. in Vienna, Va., which specializes in Russian, Spanish, Colonial and Japanese textile arts, told Farmer he estimated the painting to be quite a bit older than 1940.

Hall speculates that the painting could be mid- to late 19th-century, possibly of Dutch or German origin.

"Victorian-era artists loved to paint children, pets, flowers, angels and other subjects we might call overly romantic," he writes in an e-mail. He reasons that the images of faces could be from a previous painting. It was quite common then to paint over a canvas, he says.

Hall could only describe the images visible in the painting as rare.

Farmer is not giving up. He’s set up an e-mail address, portrai...@aol.com. He’s hoping that someone somewhere will have heard of "S. Edmund" and will know something about his painting.

But, if he doesn’t get any information, even in his silent world, he hears loud and clear that this painting is something special.

Contact Myla Barnhardt at 627-4881, ext.116, or mbarn...@news-record.com.