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Wager in Mid-air
by Ogawa MimeiIt was at a time when I had been reduced to painting street-signs for my living. My days were spent entirely in drawing huge advertisements on bill-boards for toothpaste, circuses, bottled beer and ladies’ underwear. At first the novelty of my new life made it tolerable, but soon I came to loathe it and to long for some form of escape even if only temporary.
Formerly when I had worked as a serious painter I had, of course, never taken the slightest interest in the pictures on bill-boards, let alone given any thought to the people who painted them. If anything, these pictures had struck me as an insult to my artistic sensibility. Yet now when I saw the little drawings printed on the covers of note-books in the stationer’s, or the designs glazed on the lids of paint-boxes, or even the bill-boards outside cinemas, I used to stop and look, and sometimes I found myself actually being moved by them. I suppose it was because I had come to realize that among the people who produced these drawings there must be many who, like myself, had once aspired to be real artists but had been forced by circumstances into this drudgery.
