That day, the painter drew a group of five dogs beside a cage with a cat, a grand piano viewed from above, and a stern young lady. Sometimes sympathetic passersby gave him money, and this was what he lived on. Today, his painting attracted a small crowd: children with ice cream, their grandmothers loaded with extra clothes and snacks, retirees in neatly pressed clothing, and some unshaven individuals with traces of anguish on their faces and completely empty hands. Those people never gave him anything; for that, there were middle-aged women, capable of breaking into tears at the sight of an obviously single, skinny, uncared-for man.
The general public didn't always approve of the painter's creations. Some weren't pleased that he used only three colors. They could do it better, they said. But the children liked his art, for the most part—it inspired them to their own acts of creation, except that they wanted to create not on empty pavement but directly on the painter's work. The smallest ones showered it with sand and dirt and then sprinkled it with rainwater. The resulting swamp was marked with little footprints. The painter didn't complain; he understood that this, too, was art. But the grandmothers did object. They sprang from their benches, grabbed their charges, and dragged them away, loudly lamenting wet feet, a potential cold, and ruined pants. The kids disappeared, and the painter was left alone in a dirt patch, thinking that a painting made with soil, water, and tiny footprints also deserved to be in some museum—whether of geology or of postmodern art.
