He begins in mid-sentence, as if the brush and colours were a furtherance of something begun long before and left alone to find itself again. The brush a whisper against canvas, the lines unspoken finding a voice in the sun-beaten box of his studio. Swept clean after the last painting was completed, its sparse grey walls suggest nothing of the colour-drenched rectangles he chooses to cover with such rapt attention. As if within him now another had awoken to speak with strokes upon their surfaces. Stretched taut, whitewashed and primed, dully aglow, they hang like mirrors awaiting a visitor’s face.
But who among the many personages that have walked from far oblivion to appear in his mind’s eye will come to stand before him today? Who’s dusky features will take hold of his thoughts, guide the brush, cause him to choose this ochre or that ultramarine? They are innumerable, the guests in his parlour, and he is their host, an usher at the gates between this and that other world within, unblemished and bleached of decrepitude and grief.
At times the brush makes the scabrous sound of an animal’s claws against its hide, seeking small invaders there; at others–as he outlines shadows, for instance–the smooth strokes of a mother’s fingers through the unbound hair of her child. The brush describes halos, spirals, careens like a bird trapped in a room, a bluebottle nosing the glass of its prison. Ghosted images appear, seen in negative. Rain shapes on asphalt.
He smokes ceaselessly, sometimes in his not-thereness lighting another while the first still sizzles a tabletop’s edge, forgotten in some moment of sudden understanding. He holds no pallette board to draw colour from, as did the masters of old. Instead he mixes on a low shelf set on the floor before the canvas, the base of a bookcase on squat aluminum legs.
A painting, he says, is many images superimposed one over the other, like memories; he must kill the earlier ones to reach the present, the frozen instant that will become the final work. The life of the painting moves on, passes through him. He is walking down into a streambed, crunching stones until the water slips over his head. All is noiselessness and light below. Visions wriggle past and he tries to capture them, but they slip liquid through his grasp. The salt of his sweat as he labours to bring them forth is washed away as he reaches the mossy bank on the other side. It is slippery going, this work. All is in motion, going where it is going. One image in a thousand, a thousand thousand moments that soak him through, from which he will wrest one silvery prize; a trout that expires colourless upon the floorboards.
This is what submersion has shown him, this crossing over and back: a murky underwater wraith whose eyes are knuckles sunk into night and the tumbling stone that rises to engulf her in its shadow. Her dark arms long as raven’s wings, the boulderstone a barking skull. Tobacco smoke wreathes them both. It is as if she had stood, and in so doing fractured rock, rendered it weightless as a blown thing lifted by the wind. A stone-mason’s daughter bewitching stone. All this he has seen under the surface of the stream, down in the depths with all that sways there.
On days he cannot bring himself to paint, he spends long hours searching among the pebbly shallows for stones that speak, until he has found the one that will release him. How it glitters–a jewel plucked from the eye of a sultan’s serpent! But when he gets it home, pulls from his pocket the smooth rounded weight and lays it lovingly in the light, the colour has all but drained away.
Most people, the painter tells me, think that artists are mad. But the reverse, he assures me, is true; artists are sane, but while they work they slowly begin to go mad, until all is as it should be and the work is complete. Then they return to ground, to the laws that bind us all. And so for now he is steeped in madness, overcome on this rocky plain the figure and the stone have emerged from, a raving thing. He speaks from out this state, stepping backwards from the canvas to mutter things, grey fingers tangled before the flecked white of his smock. Smoke billows from his nostrils. His eyes, what I can see of them, have gone mine-dark.
The wraith as he brings her forth is shorn of all her hair. Newly hatched, her bald pate gleams as the pebbles do while submerged. The hanging block of granite spins in place before her darksome gaze. The stone, it seems–or one facet of it–has begun to take on colour. At first it is applied recklessly, with a flourish. But when the brush meets the surface again it moves much more reverently, as if hesitant to continue, to unburden itself of its fair plumage. It is a holy thing, this colour-laden brush, dipped in a multitude of feverish hues.
The woman is doing something to the bulk of floated stone. Causing it to bleed. That, or the risen sun has come to grace it with the first fingers of morning light. Its fractured tip is bathed in sudden warmth, in candleglow. The woman’s wings seem to flutter against her sides. She is turned partially away, her bosom and torso in darkness still, in shadowlands. All her attention is focused upon the sun-touched weight, suspended in air as if by some effort of will. As we watch, its top is turned into a mountain peak, the chiselled face of a monolith in the far reaches of the waste. Something the sphynxes riddled about. Left behind for millennia after the glaciers receded, awaiting discovery.
Or is it palm-sized, a piece of something she has flung from her and enspelled before it tumbled to ground? Something chosen for its colour and and shape and straitions, for the shimmery grain of its being, plucked from the stream and held for awhile until, warmed by her hand and the light it began to lose, by degrees, that which had made it unique? A stolen jewel from the crown of a deposed king. She has caught it with her mind, stilled its arc at the very moment of its turning.
The painter has become invisible–a spirit in a spirit photograph so constantly in motion that all we see of him is ghosted, blurred, bled-through, unclear. The outlines of a figure never fully present.
Birdsong resounds against the boxed grey walls, falls like feathers to the weathered floorboards. His doorbell. And still he works, the umbilicus unbroken, a fume of cloud about his head. The bell goes again, lark chatter commingling with the cigarette smoke. I glance at the painting. The stone in its turning has developed new facets; the darkling edge of the face not bathed by the sun purpled by its absence, cast in shadow. It is in focus, suddenly, a sharpened foreground shard. The woman behind remains a sylph, the merest smudged imprint of human form. Birdsong again. Two of his students. They saunter in, heedless of the intrusion, all smiles to see their mentor at work. With a stained yellow rag he wipes his hands clean. The brush lies forgotten in a shallow dish of turpentine, bleeding colours.
Who are these women he has painted, shorn of their locks and animating matter? They stand, pinked and pearly in their nakedness, mutely attuned to their ministrations as tonnage lifts to darken the surrounding air. All of them bathed in bruised morning light and glimpsed between the fragments they have chosen to suspend, part and particle of something far larger than the canvases can allow. They stare with hooded eyes, full-lipped and heavy-breasted, fingers splayed and held away from their hips. Beings of a stony country.
