She
dips the brush into the copper pot of balsam. She is still at thirty-one
experimenting with mediums, with glazes, with all her manifold materials. She
has learned how untrustworthy the chemicals she needs for her art are. The
primers, the pigments, the poisons, the oils. They betray her constantly, like
unfaithful lovers.
I paint from nature; I paint what I see.
She adds medium to the colour she has
mixed on her palette. Her palette with its pageantry of firebrand earth
colours. She squints at the furrows and folds in the boy’s shirt. At its rhythm
of lines. Its choreography of lights and darks. Its shadow shapes and submerged
order of half tones. Adds another touch of cadmium red to the colour she has
made on her palette. The colour glistens pink like the flesh of a newly spliced
watermelon. She holds out her sable brush as she strides forward. Her narrowed
blue eyes move back and forth between the image on the canvas and the face of
the boy by its side. There is a rhythm in the act, as if a pendulum swings back
and forth in her mind. She lays down strokes on the air as she walks, quick
corkscrewing flourishes of the brush, rehearsing her intention, marshalling her
forces, whipping up her blood. She stops at her easel. Stands forward on her
toes. Makes a new mark on the canvas. In her idle left hand she holds a dozen
brushes, splayed out like a fan.
Today is a good day. Today she feels she
is the master of her craft. Today she is free of the grinding tyranny of doubt.
The voice that mocks her ambition. The voice that bites and slanders and causes
her more heartache than any other voice. Today she is focused, she is exultant.
Her every brushstroke like a wake of radiance. Today she can move the paint
around the canvas at will. If only painting were like this every day. Without
the sudden extinguishing of light, the collapsing of belief, the cursing and
flailing, the knots and clenched fists in a world gone suddenly dark.
The boy, Leo, blinks when she studies
him. She senses he has to steel himself against the audacity of her exacting
eye. He sits with the sleeves of his jersey pulled down over his hands.
I paint from nature; I paint what I see.
There is a physical intimacy when she is
up at her canvas, when they are side by side. His body heat, his heartbeat,
some essence of his being is part of her mood as she lays down paint. She
breathes him in, breathes him out, onto the canvas. Sometimes she feels an
impulse to touch his face, to trace the contours of his skull with her hand.
She lays down a brushstroke, smudges it
delicately with her finger. There is paint beneath her nails, engrained in the
lines on her hands. Her smock is a grubby rainbow of fused colours. She wipes
her brushes on the blue fabric. Everything in the studio is peppered with
pigment, smeared with oil paint, sticky with resins. The coins and banknotes in
her purse often have alizarin crimson or raw umber fingerprints on them. Her
ration coupons are crisp with sun-thickened oil stains or blackened with
charcoal dust.
She walks backwards away from the canvas.
Tilting her head this way and that. Squinting at her picture. She walks forwards
and backwards along this same trail every day for hours on end. The boards
beneath her feet shaking, making things rattle in the studio. As happens when
the planes fly low overhead. As happens when the armoured vehicles pass by on
the riverside street below.
While she follows the stroke of the brush
over the canvas her eyes narrow to thin slits, her brows wrinkle up, her tongue
darts out frequently and licks at her upper lip or she pulls faces she would be
horrified by if she saw herself in a mirror.
When she is up by her canvas she can
sometimes smell rabbit skin glue. A rotting kind of smell that catches at the
back of her throat, that makes her feel queasy. A smell of death among
earthroots. There is a blackened pot of the fudge-coloured solution that she
has recently heated on the stove in the small kitchen.
She looks at her image in a small mirror
where it seems distant and separate from her, the umbilical cord cut, the
intimate connection severed.
She frowns. She curses aloud, forgetting
she is not alone. Scrapes away some of the paint she has laid down with a
palette knife. Every decision is measured, is intricate, is fatal.
But this is pretence on her part, another
trick one part of herself plays on another part. A brushstroke is never fatal,
though it is a vital element of the painting process to pretend this is not the
case. To pretend there is no room for error. She plays countless tricks on the
artist in her. Holds back knowledge from her as though the artist in her is a
child and she the mother, filtering through intelligence only when she is sure
it won’t do any harm. A brushstroke can be erased as though it never existed.
She erases many of the strokes she puts down.
The air raid siren begins shrieking and
before long she hears the now familiar low drone of planes in the sky. The
grumbling noise gains in intensity. It becomes a sensation in the body, an
irritation on the skin, like a feeding insect. The frames rattle, dust is
displaced. Circles shiver on the surface of the balsam in the pot on her
palette. She goes to the window. Lifts the black drape that keeps out the
reflected glare of daylight. Never have the planes been this low in the sky
before.
