Colours tumble through his mind, suspended stones, each turning in the light, until he has selected the one to begin with. The first strokes attach themselves like butterflies, rosily aglow, then spread to cover her skull, her scalp. She is a block of clay with fingerholes for eyes. Sunlight falls from her face to spatter her breast. She takes on the likeness of stone; her shadow cast for miles over barren ground, a rough-hewn giantess left to buckle and collapse. These sudden colours seem to float before her body. Visible now, she begins to glisten in her mantle of flesh. A few ochre strokes and she is gilded, a bronze wheeled out into the sun.
The light begins to describe her shoulder bones, the cords between neck and breastplate. Her arms are thrown back to receive the weight of the stone. The mouth–a hole, an open maw–reveals itself, the lips pressed closed as she assumes dimension. It parts as if to speak, but only colours come, her first words. She grows younger and younger, shedding years and gravity, begins gradually to soften. In communion with this thing she has lifted from the earth with the dark powers of thought.
He turns his head to the side, stands back, decides, wades in again. Smoking, smoking. The brush tip enlivens, metes out the feminine. A single eye appears, swollen shut. She blinks, suddenly awake, gains a swan’s grey neck. Each soft stroke whispers another word in my ear, tells me who she will become. Her eye closes against the risen block’s weight, as if the effort of keeping it aloft were a burden, a pressing need.
He changes brushes, opts for the larger one from yesterday, and her hips assume form. He carves at her, chipping away. He can see the shapes within the block, and works to draw them out. The diamond of her heart encased in carbon. Her features smear, blur, contort, soften, harden, mutable as clay. She speaks to his brush, tells it where to go, guides the feathery movements. How it must feel against her skin–a bluebottle touching down in darkness, the whispered heat of abulations upon her cheek. He touches the dark and the light of her, controls the sun and all her supple shades; weather-bringer, shifter of clouds.
Her features take on such delicacy of expression as to stop a man breathing. The weight of the stone presses upon her, brings her beauty forth. As he works, she becomes real from the neck down. Alive. Chips flake away, reveal roundnesses, the light cupping her breasts. One dark aureole, the other a gaping wound through which her beating heart is visible; a tunnel to its velvet-lined chamber, deep within. Now rosy peachlight touches down, drapes her. She has the swollen belly of the nine month’s gone, the innocence of a child. Her hips widen, reveal a horse’s muscled flanks, a snail’s tapered tail. A leg emerges, bright as pearl, a chambered nautilus wrenched from the tide. Her knee breaks the picture plane, intrudes into the room. The other dangles threadlike, a torn flag after battle.
This floating girl. Tell me what you will be, what it is you are trying to become. Her lips part as if to explain. Her mind is in the stone–I grasp that now. She and it are causing each other to be; each remembers the other, brings to the forefront of all that is known this one indelible mirror image. The stone is a carven king’s head hewn from a statue. She reflects upon the arc of its long fall–her father’s head, the kingdom come to an end. And she, his only daughter, placed among the acolytes as a protection; gifted, touched. She achieves womanhood with this lone recollection.
Her eye opens, the pupil an absence. Her lips take on colour, warmth, fill with blood. She inhales, takes her first breath. The tip of her nose, sweep of her neck, swell of a bheaving reast. This waif, ragged from the waist down, is taking shape. She acquires flesh. Light from the stone seeps into her face, brings it blushing to life. The art of her open gaze bores into the stone, turns its facets to a diamond hardness. I want to see this face in dreams, want it speaking to me from the dark of my unknowing.
Her long tail streams out behind, drags in the muck. A crimson eyebrow raises in surprise. She is wingless, but no less an angel, incomplete but holy. Older than starlight yet in the bud of her youth. With a few deft strokes he closes her eye, blinds her so that all is interior thought. Paints out the brow I so adored. Puts her to sleep.’Yes, is better,’ he mutters, a fag dangling as he searches for the lighter. The figures in the other paintings remain mute, show no surpise at her many transmutations, her awakening and sudden hushed lullaby retreat. Her somnambulism. Dark legs outlined in dark, chunks of flesh the colour of salmon candy, sliced into strips at the knee. A near-solid finger of white lies curled against her abdomen.
He lays the paint on thick, begins to sketch in the landscape below. Figure and ground. The field from where the stone has come, clutched in her thought. I cannot imagine where it will go, where she will end up being. She has arisen like a stormcloud to haunt this dreamscape. The distant mountains tremble; a voice of many stones speaking together in tumbledown majesty. The colours pour down from above to pool along the canvas bottom. She is sun-struck, asleep in the dusk. The massive block is her dream, poised above the mountainous rim of the waste. Two dark sticks entwine to form her other arm, outflung against some inner tremor.
He moves backwards and forewards, sits, stands, smokes, a consciousness both within the frame and without. There is nothing, no realm beyond the music of what he sees, what is revealed to him as he adds, subtracts, paints. Abruptly he drops the brush, proclaims with sticky lamp-blacked fingers raised to his face: ‘Ehhhhhh, my eyes tired,’ and stalks from the room. Enough for today. He will return to smoke and think, to stare unblinking at what he has called into being. What has spoken through him this day. ‘Sometime painting is close,’ he says. He has dried his hands on the black of his shirtfront. We fall silent. Dust motes, the oily scent of fresh-laid paint. The eyeless, beckoning girl.
Her arms end in darkness. He sits up, coughs, mentions Camus’ essay on Sisyphus; the myth about a man who labours to carry stones, one by one, up the side of a mountain, only to watch helpless as they tumble down again. ‘This my painting today. Bad, very bad. Is closed to me today. Close.’ He goes into the kitchen, comes back with a china bowl, a knife, a salt cellar and a lemon. He peels the lemon like an orange, quarters it, sprinkles it liberally with salt and tucks in. A smile broadens his whiskered face. ‘Chai!’ he proclaims, a dirty finger angled upwards, and shuffles away.
