A Red Deer artist is seeking a missing painting that disappeared from her storage locker.
After a waterline break occurred earlier this week, the storage locker in an apartment building at 104 Boyce St. was left unlocked for a few days while fans were used to dry out the flooding, said Grace Prospero.
On Wednesday, she looked inside a cardboard tube that had once held a large rolled-up painting on canvas in the locker — and discovered the tube empty.
“I just panicked. My mind started racing,” said Prospero, who immediately called her brother to commiserate. “I couldn’t believe it. I knew it was there…”
Prospero’s brother had once decorated a wall in his former house with the missing painting, called Davida.
Prospero, a retired advertising artist, had painted an acrylic two-dimensional version of Donatello’s bronze statue of David in the late 1990s as a statement about how few female heroes are commemorated in art.
The painting contained all of the recognizable elements of Donatello’s David — except his male genitalia.
Prospero’s brother had hung Davida in his former home until he moved.
Prospero said she had no room on her apartment walls for a four-by-six foot painting, so the canvas had been removed from its frame and put into storage.
She is now upset to discover it missing since she had been planning to unroll tand stretch the canvas out on a frame again as her brother wanted to re-hang it in his new place.
Davida, painted in the late 1990s, had been part of Prospero’s solo art show in Red Deer’s Kiwanis Gallery in about 2007.
“I would rather somebody returned the painting out of the goodness of their heart,” she said. But the artist is still planning to report the painting’s disappearance to police and is considering offering a reward for the artwork’s return.