There is thrift-store art, which is worse than it is old, until the date on the back makes it a kind of personal riddle.
Mitchell Carey, a 26-year-old Marine, had been window shopping the art section of a store in his town, when a drawing of a face, the hair, the glasses so much like a personal joke as told by time that he paused. It was labeled as an original by Chris Cunningham in 1978, over twenty years earlier than Carey was born. The subject was a man looking away smoking a big pipe and bore what Carey later termed as an uncanny similarity to a photograph of himself at about the same age in his life, including hanging hair.
Carey said to Newsweek: The thing was uncanny. And, particularly, with regard to the length of my hair then!
The drawing remained largely out of sight during the period of two years. Carey confessed that it was only upon noticing a consistent stream of similarity find online, where individuals were appearing as portraits, photographic images and various bizarre objects, which appeared to resemble their own faces, that he decided to put up his side by side comparison. On Reddit, where he also posted the thrifted drawing with a self-perception photo, he put it in a deadpan context: “Thrift store drawing made 22 years before I was born that looks like me with as broody fisherman.” The post had thousands of upvotes, and commenters were divided into those who did not believe it and those who found it funny enough to comment on it.
Carey added that even the moment of discovery was simply a ritual like any weekend shopping, and this only added to the surprise. He had been bargaining with his then girlfriend at the store, where the art section was, when he spotted the portrait among other junk. It was in the sweet spot of the thrift-store legend: that something had been lying waiting all its decades before being discovered by the right person, even when the answer can be as elementary as the chance and a recognizable type of face.
In the comments, he wrote: I took it home, feel like I would not get cursed. Also strange to imagine that there was another person in their house with a picture that resembled me.
That discomfort, a bit of humor, a bit of superstition, appears over and over in second-hand art. In one of the finds on Reddit, a buyer discovered a portrait of the 19th century within a painting purchased at thrift and converted a simple frame into a miniature archive. Even the comments on that post included a practical assessment one of them said Second portrait is probably second half of the 19th century, probably 1850 to 1880 or so the collector desire that most thrifters have, which is that a cast-off picture still has provenance, mysteriousness, and worth as a record of everyday lives.
The doppelganger hook is particularly adhesive. Mississippi mother Jenny Smith identified that she became obsessed as a result of seeing a painting online resembling her, complete with similar hair, eyes and a forehead she recognized at one glance. In giving an account of her search she said, When I opened it I was at once like, “Who painted me?” With the assistance of social media, she was able to track the portrait across state lines and hung it in her living room which she said felt like unboxing herself.
The same was true of the post by Carey: a clash of the banal and the unlikely. A drawing in a thrift-store, a drawing in an old date, a face that appears to be duplicated can make one laugh, squint and conjecture then retain the portrait anyway then keep it just in case.
