One Moment, a painter's perspective

     I'm in the mood, she told herself strolling her lush garden exhaling a moist earth-smell from the morning rain. Can I do it? She paused by the pond of water lilies. Will he let me?

     Tiny ripples between the aquatic herbs made her travel back the years and time zones that had separated their long distance relationship born on a writing web site. How corny. And yet.

     She shook her head at how, at once, they were struck by the uncanny similarity of the voice in each other's stories, which a Cartesian mind would shrug with a laconic 'same culture, same education' but their imagery and perspective came from a deeply rooted layer, which he couldn't explain but with more stories, she with pictures of her paintings, both not playing by the book. They had quickly shared more than a tacit understanding, sometimes jumping to another topic because they knew what the other was thinking, like siblings do. Often, though, he had paid particular attention to her words because she looked at life with the eye of a painter, saying that he craved for that perspective he felt he couldn't learn from a distance.

     Words aren't good enough. She stretched her back and arms up in the air, I'll show you. She blinked several times in the early afternoon sunlight and concentrated. Gradually, a form took shape before her eyes, his body. A voice took precedence over the birds and the wind, his voice. Footsteps followed close upon hers to the far end of the property, his footsteps. She walked as if on a tight rope, The time has come, not daring to turn around before reaching her atelier, This is it, her head was spinning, her heart pounding. "Are you ready?" she asked nervously.

     "Of course, I am," he said vehemently, "I have been waiting so long to enter your . . ."

     "Hush," she whispered, a trembling finger pressing on his lips from a distance. Don't break the spell of the moment, she thought to herself.

     This is unexpected, He thought back to their connivance; the writer in him adding: Who would have foreseen this moment?

     She shivered, I did. This, is magical.

     The man in him beheld with growing agitation the excitement spread in her eyes, on her parted lips, the rise of her throat swallowing, her fast-breathing, her nipples prodding under the second skin of her peach satiny tee shirt, her small knotted hands toying with the keyring held tight against her belly wrapped in a flowing flowery sarong.

     "This place will never be the same after this," she said with her Polish accent, which he knew came out in a state of extreme fatigue, strong emotion or heavy inebriety. She slowly closed her feverish blue eyes for a moment. "And I'm okay with that."

     The petite woman he had always known eager, exuberant and full of energy, was ready and waiting, he dared say to himself, like the vestal virgin of a dedicated temple. And in a sense, she was: she had told him no one enters her atelier, a sacrosanct place she had kept unspoiled from visitors; only her dogs and one day a bird had come in, not her friends, not an agent, not even her husband. He wondered why.

     But he was extremely curious if not exceedingly tempted to cross another boundary, break more rules perhaps by way of what he saw as a living learning experience.

     Through the large window pane of the dark green door, he saw shelves of books, wrapped new canvases, an easel with a painting, the whitewashed walls, more shelves, a few hung paintings, the bouncing trapeze of the light from the skylight pouring down to the cement floor, a threadbare carpet blotted with somber stains, more canvases lined up on a plank in the far corner. All this looked normal to him and yet he felt like flipping back and forth on each end of a powerful magnet, pushed and pulled between his insatiable curiosity and a strange feeling born from his wild imagination, for he was a writer after all, and he had never been in an artist's studio. What secrets laid there, what alchemy did she use, was there any hidden coffin, or a skeleton lurking in here? He had seen photos of her work; some looked as if made under the influence of a strong impediment, others come directly from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, quite a few showed barb wires slashing bodies, knotted fingers carving corps, and the like. "Well, maybe another day," he volunteered reluctantly.

     She decidedly unlocked her atelier. Crick-crack. "Go," and stepped aside.

     He opened the door with an unsure hand, it whined softly; a warm breath of air snatched him inside, he walked on eggs, wrapped in the ambient calmness of the rather spare little room bathing in an unctuous mixture of scents of paint, turpentine, dust, smoke, leftover humidity from the rain and . . . and a heady animal musk coming from around the large rectangle oil painting standing on the easel, half parchment half papyrus-looking resembling from afar a Native American war shield. In the crude whitish light from the skylight, its two large chocolate-brown concentric circles forcibly sucked him closer, its blue and green slits hooked his eyes, its red wound-like marks burnt his trembling fingers the nearer he got. He moved backward, hit the table corner with his hip, rested on it, dumbfounded by an ineffable mind-boggling hunch about the sort of spell she must have been under to birth the drawing, about the magic she ought to have used to mix the colors, her legerdemain to combine the strokes, and which incantation made her spill herself or, rather, her self, hours after hours for sure, on that big painting he had only seen one or two in-the-making pictures. To see it in 3D was for him like being in the presence of another person. Watching it from such a close quarter was like being presented with a tray of forbidden fruits. Had she mesmerized him? He turned around, lightheaded.

     She stood in the door frame, holding the knob, the keys dangled down the lock. "Welcome to my lair." Her blond hair was flickering in the breeze, drowned in the golden rays of the sun; her barely drawn smile carried an air of innocence come from childhood. Her eyes swept the space between them, around him, on the walls, over the shelves, back to him. She came closer, "I had imagined this moment so many times," and reached, "The air is saturated with your presence," she stopped inches from him, "I can't believe you're really here!"

     "Your magic works miracles," I acknowledge. "You must be a very powerful witch. Is that your secret?"

     She pinches her lips and then, "You know this one and that one," she points to the dual circle painting on the easel, the blue couple in front of a stash against the wall, "And this one:" the birds made of tree leaves just behind. She pulls the next stretcher aside, "That was just a test."

     "Oh, the Illusion Black Silk Camisole?"

     She smiles, "Whatever," lifts another one. "They have no names, I paint moments, not things."

     I knew that, but still. "That one looks like . . . Sorry."

     One after the other, she takes them out for a glimpse, a glance, a coup d'oeil, a stare, a peek or in full view for a while, and rearranges them next to where they've been garnered, piled or filed away. I help her with the large pieces: this golden swimmer, a blue couple with green arabesques aura, a callipygian godlike ocher sleeper and, here they are: The Egg, the Treasure Island Map and The Thinker she made with papier-mâché out of one of my manuscripts accidentally doused in White Spirit; and then this other sitting body, perhaps a widow, spilling letters and numbers from her head while staring at a window facing a window facing a window where what appears to be the white and blue foetus of her self awaits.

     I know she kindly disapproves, although it amuses her, but how can I speak of her paintings if I didn't name them? What else can I say when I see a dyslexic blue poetess, turquoise Siamese sisters, a headless woman and her snake named Juliet Tango, or a blue Peeping Tom behind a city skyline? I call this shape The Impossible Newspaperman because it's titled From Intimate To Universal across its body which appears from a distance as if it were made out of newspaper columns; this one looks like a hand from Limbo holding a stretcher over an orange female body as to gauge the best framing perspective before cutting it into place; here is a feeble female floating in mid air, hung by red straps, asleep or dead to the world; next, the lacy vanishing ghost of yet another female. Is she her?

     In the rather rapid review of her years of metier I try to follow the thread of her inspiration frozen in time on the medium, each a Dorian Gray of the moment, as if I had been in her head while she was painting. Surreptitiously though, my mind slips into a maelstrom of strong feelings of disembodiment drawn from her various 'moments' – which she had referred to as her facets. Have I melted into her mind or she into mine?

Everything goes too fast, this feels like a dream, I must have become an angel or a ghost for in slow motion and from a higher distance, I see myself watching her showing me her paintings until what I call the striptease of her work stops, and I fall back on earth. Here and now. In my body inundated with the crude whitish light from the skylight of her whitewashed small sparse studio at the end of the lush garden.

     "So, what do you think?" seems to ask the parchment-papyrus painting on the easel. Its large concentric chocolate-brown circles stare back at me like the eye of a Cyclops shedding red, blue and green tears all over his face.

     "I don't know what to say," I mumble back to the inert but vivid picture on display.

     "About this one?" She swings the door close to let me see a small tripartite composition of a different nature: on the somber left, a haloed man with Bermuda shorts in a foetus position, or in an embrace with a spectral shadow blurred in the dark background; the light orange middle section looks like an archery target crossed with hazy letters, standing on a support in the form of a blue and black three-dimensional X; to the right, a blue gravid human shape with her back seemingly disintegrating into written symbols hued from Prussian blue to dull silver grey and striking black.

     "What is this?"

     "You decide." Her eyes are avid, misted over.

     "Are you crying?"

     She shakes her head, her throat goes up and down. "Happy." She presses her hands on her chest down to her belly, "I'm all sweaty," and rubs her arms, "Gives me goose bumps too."

     "Same thing here." I mimic her last gesture. "Your technique is so varied and yet the style is unique. Difficult to say but I'm learning. I must confess I had the very strong impression to be at a strip show. And, as a low class voyeur, I took it all for granted."

     "Knowing you, I don't think so."

     "And then, from this heap of images, I saw glimpses of another kind of striptease. I missed something, a key perhaps." Her silence doesn't look like a good omen. "It was deep, insightful and unfortunately too fast." Her raised eyebrow calls for more, doesn't it? "I may be a writer but, here, now, I can't find better words. In fact, I'm running out of words. Sorry."

     "Don't worry," she touches my forearm, "Happens to me too, I can't explain what I do. I paint moments, what I feel in that moment." Her hand is shaking, slips down into mine. "The image is clear in my mind."

     I turn away from her closed eyes to scrutinize the painting behind the door. "I'd like to know, at least, what you saw when you painted this one."

     She pulls away to go sit down on her stool at the table. "I can describe it in a very Cartesian fashion but you wouldn't understand."

     "Give me just an example: what about this archery target in the center?"

     "That's not a target." She stares at me while rolling a cigarette. "It's the drawing of the pavement labyrinth of Chartres Cathedral; the big X is to thumb my nose at people with the only letter of the alphabet missing from those you see – which, you notice, are all upside down."

     "But why? I don't understand."

     "You dwell on the image." She blows her smoke at me, "Not on what it represents."

     "Oh, I see: your 'moment', another one of your facets."

     "Exactly. Your memory serves you well but it doesn't suffice, does it?" Her Polish accent resurfaces. "Look past the picture with your heart, your guts, whatever; not with your eyes, you can't think nor feel with your eyes."

     "But you said you paint what you see. I write what I see."

     "It's in the mind. I don't paint all the details but they're all there, I see them, sometimes just behind the painting, it's my perspective, the way I paint."

     "Teach me, then."

     "No need to: you do the same, I've read your stories. You don't write everything you see, it'd take too long for one thing and, as most people only see what they see in a painting, they read what they want to hear in a book." She shrugs and relights her hand-made cigarette. "For me, to read a book or watch a painting, it's almost the same thing – ditto when I write or paint. Only the support changes. It's visual, there is a construction, a precise goal and beyond that, a sound, a vibration."

     "What's your trick?"

     "You want a formula?"

     "No." I turn back to the painting behind the door. "I'm confused."

     "To understand, you must first see the rest."

     "What, what's on each side of the painting?"

     She puts down her cigarette, "No," and brushes past by me. "Come. There is more in storage." She leads me outside on the wooden deck, "Watch where you put your feet, the planks are riddled with woodworm, or rotten."

     I tiptoe in her footsteps, "Where are you taking me?" I throw a quick look over my shoulder; the mid afternoon sun makes me blink, the serenity of the lush garden reassures me.

     Crick-crack.

     She opens another dark green door at the end of the building, it rattles on its corroded hinges. She disappears inside a gloomy room, weird sounds respond to her intrusion. She flips the switch of a bulb dangling down the ceiling on twisted wires, a yellow brush of light repels the penumbra of a shambles, Bluebeard's forbidden room, Hades' dominion or Ali Baba's cavern. Is this the end of her world? "Come in. I'm not gonna eat you." She laughs, "Not raw."

     Not funny. Being in this somber little room in the far back of her property could give rise to ill-assorted, volatile, fleeting, ambivalent ideas. My feverish imagination hurries to assail me with those: I quickly find myself the character of a novel, a novel which could end badly, for nobody but her husband knows I'm here.

     A little voice in my head tries to appease my renewed indecision from earlier, before entering her atelier. "You're a man, you're bigger than she is. What's the worse that can happen to you?"

     The writer in me is quick to respond. "I could die or be enslaved, disappear without traces. Weren't my shambles-Bluebeard-Hades-Ali Baba descriptions insightful enough?"

The room makes me feel claustrophobic, I hold the frame of the door to give myself a countenance, sniffing the stuffy air inside. Rows of paintings line up the walls, side by side like little soldiers on the ready before the onslaught. She awaits in the middle of her army of sorts, pursing her lips, her eyes staring wide open at me or, so I feel, pass through me. Is she having a moment? I scan the battlefield to be. "What's so special about these?"

     "They are much older," she murmurs as to not wake them up, or to confide in me. She carefully lifts a small canvas, as if removing the dressing of a wound, "This one is one of my first moments." A copper-colored female head, bald and expressionless, big eyes, thick lips, the face framed and covered crosswise with straight lines of sanguine thorns. "That one too."

     Another 'thorny' face, black and white, tattooed, behind heavy bars. Then a female's back, half covered with flame-like markings; her self-portrait à la Frida Kahlo, another one half white half red with a hand pulling at her scalp; a series of either barb wires or fingers tearing at twisted women bodies – apparently the same shape and curves in diverse dusky pigmentation – giving the illusion of a master and slave macabre dance, the final ritual of the bullfighter and the animal. My imagination runs wild on the imagery. "You said not to focus on the image but is that you or any of your models?"

     "Those are my states of mind." Beads of perspiration pearl on her forehead, my mouth flows with a salty taste; the yellow light of the bulb makes her sweat appear to carve her pale skin, I want to rub it off. She shakes her head, "Don't break the spell." I wanted to ask, she reads my mind again, "The true purpose of this is to fulfill the reason why you're here."

     Of course, to learn the painter's perspective, but why showing me her old stuff?

     She proceeds with yet another series of delicate unwrapping, shedding deeper and deeper layers of what seems to be her bygones kept under veils of darkness, cobwebs and tarp fabric, meticulously pushing me further into her shitty years, happy years, forcing herself not to tremble while bending down to dig another painted perspective of her kaleidoscopic peregrination in life.

     There is a diamond-shaped sweat mark in her back, causing this tantalizing attraction to touch her. Her look stops my gesture, "This, is very special." She pulls up a black and white etching of a woman with snakes wrapped around her left leg, around her trunk, coming out of her head like tentacles.

     Was that one of her moments?

     "I still have the mark." She pulls the strands of hair sticking on her left cheek, uncovering a large spot of dark skin and a patch of meager curly grey hair over her temple.

     My fingers don't care to break the spell. The hair is prickly, all dried up. "Must have been the devil himself who did that to you." She recoils, winces. A gust of hot air fills the silent room like a tongue of fire. She is crying, this makes me feel the more uneasy. "Why do you keep those . . ."

     "If you want to learn, you can't be a goodie-two-shoes. This, is my Inferno. I come here to resource when my painting is about to change."

     "And you brought me here because?"

     She flips through a third row, "To create, I have to see, hear, smell, taste, touch, experience and feel everything, including you. And so should you."

     More barb wires and plucked corpses behind bars intertwine with headless ghostly shapes. Not a single landscape, not an animal, unless one could see as such the sprawled bodies on a hellish-looking or dreamlike background. This is not a witching hour, there is no magic, no hocus-pocus, only vertigo in a whirlpool of powerful feelings pouring out of the paintings.

     Canvas stretcher after wood panel after cardboard slat, inconspicuous barb wires, bars and fingers press onto me like those she painted, indiscernible brushes push on me as she has done countless times, the accumulated layers of her work stick to my skin as to make me feel their number and weight; I become them, spread-eagle on an invisible easel hovering in mid air; dusted, tightened, prepped, scrapped, drawn upon, painted over, showered with light, oil colors, charcoal, chemicals and whatever she has used from her body, the earth, the vegetation, torn pieces of clothing; days, weeks, months and years glue themselves onto me like the steam of the inferno from her stares, shouts, thoughts, laughs, cries, laments and moaning behind the bars of forbidden loves, tearing couplings, insatiable sensations, unquenchable feelings and a dire need for sentiments.

     My head spins under the overload of her visions melting into me like lava, her hand makes me spin on that hidden easel hanging at the ceiling. Stirred by her painting knives, split by her vengeful scissors, wiped by her rags, burnt and waxed by candles, splashed with sand and alcohol, stained with dejection, spit, sweat, coffee rings and cigarette smoke, kneaded by the weather changes, bathed by a bittersweet languor under the blows of time past, I feel the thousand layers of her naked, skinned, deboned facets scattered on the fantail of her exhibit which makes me belch and shiver in my spine from the inexplicable insight of what she had then intimately embodied on her various media, and that she liberally shares now in her somber innermost recesses at the very end of her lush garden.

     Seconds feel like minutes, I hear birds, the wind in the thick branches, my slow beating heart, pulsing in my temples.

     If I were able to count the years I've seen parade before my eyes, if I could piece together the puzzle of her painted stories and experiences together, I'd say she must be hundreds years old. And yet, the petite woman standing in front of me looks like a young girl opened to unexampled developments in her heart, newfangled landmarks in her life, larger horizons in her art.

     "This is only a bridge," she confides to offer one more, but recondite, glimpse of her self.

     A bridge to where? And what for?

     I trail behind her, back to the atelier and its crude whitish light pouring down the skylight onto the . . . no, not the Cyclops, not the war shield, onto the wheel of time as the latest of her series. The parchment-papyrus concentric circles with red wounds, blue slashes, green slices and brown markings show a symbolic composition I can better decipher; I feel the springs of her artistic mad female child sensuality and rage spread all over it; I see her body fluids under the oil colors; I hear the violence of her sadness and love on the brushstrokes; I smell the scents of her life on the canvases. "I feel lightheaded."

     "Quite normal," she giggles. "The word canvas comes from the Latin word cannabis."

     "That doesn't explain your style." I tell her my impressions about her showings here and in her storage. "I've been around the world but you gave me quite of a ride through your years of work. I'm not sure I quite get it: what happened to you, to paint like you do?"

     "Birth. Rape. Drugs. Prison. Cancer. Death."

     "What a laconic answer. And besides, you're not dead."

     "I have gone through the rest." She pulls her hair in a chignon, "You knew that," and holds it together with two brushes by way of Japanese Kanzashi hairpins. "But this is over. Can't you tell by the texture of the air? In the storage, there are shreds of flesh clinging to the cement walls." She looks around with an air of contentment, peace, "Here, it's more in the registers of that milky sunlight mixed with leftover humidity, some dust and . . ." She relights her cigarette from earlier, pulls a long drag from it. "Before you came, it was polymorphous in nature, colors, sounds, forms and shapes, unlike next door," and hands it to me. "Here, I painted across the board of my feelings, not in the trench of time past. Now . . . I don't know how to sum it up in one word, you're the writer . . . now, it has something ethereal which grew heavier with your presence; more sweet and sour. There is another vibration in the air, like the musical Fa floating in blue."

     "I'm no painter but that's quite poetic."

     "This place has definitely changed with you."

     "And I, coming in here."

     She prepares her palette. "I want you to impregnate this place even more."

     "Is that a game?"

     "Anything you want. Look at the painting, it's me, it's your mother, it's your lover. Look at her, touch her, smell her, kiss her." She pushes me in the low of my back. "Close your eyes now and rub your fingers on her skin, feel her lines and cracks, her scars and wound. Don't think, let go, feel the moment."

     Subdued somehow, curious or willing, I let my hands go about to the edges of the canvas, the images of the war shield, the Cyclops and the wheel of life dissolve in my head; I fill my nostrils with the animal musk I perceived at first, sweet and sour as she just said, it's heady or she has me under a spell. In a sneaky way, memories of childhood resurface, the first time I made out; my nose itches from spices baked in the African sun, the damp earth after the monsoon in Asia; my mouth tastes the ganja cookies in Mexico; my ears resound with the breaking thunder around the sailboat in Australia; the stench of death at the hospital blurs all that is mine, my senses assaulted pellmell by her imagery: the sight of wounded animals on barb wires, a cold prison cell, a child molested under an oak tree, another blond angel with a scarified T on the chest, moaning swingers, singing mourners, anesthesia, a surgeon's scalpel in the belly, sleep, the rarefied air of the Himalaya, quietness, her lush garden in the mid afternoon sun, her small body nestled against my back, her husky voice, "Are you ready?"

     She hands me the tools of her trade, "I'll show you how to."

     She helps me dip my brush in her colors, "Easy now."

     She guides my hand, "Feel it."

     Shiny strikes of mauve spread here and there on the bouncing canvas.

     "Harder," she presses on my wrist, the brush twists, some paint drips down the canvas, "Faster," some drops on the old carpet, "Don't think," her voice tainted with the Polish accent, my hand glides further up, ". . . there you go," another wave dies to the side, "do it again," she lets go of me, "be one with the canvas," there is that musky scent from the painting again, the palette shakes in my hand, reddish brown on her trembling canvas, blinding sunlight, palette, dabs and strikes of silver blue along her lines, palette, white pearls, no, screaming green and blue, long strokes in mid air like the baton of a conductor, I hear the sound, a low pitch Fa, and then I see twirling images of me on the painting, "stay with the emotion," the brush gets a life of itself sprung from the depths of her body of work I just saw, "be in the moment," palette, sweet orange for my skin, quivering canvas, palette, black soot for my soul, recoiling canvas, each stroke sweeping the storage spell, "save the moment," palette, warm ocher for my will, stretching canvas, I pound on it as if I wanted to go to the other side, palette, mother-of-pearl fingers, canvas, canvas, canvas, I squeeze my brush to the last drops on the bottom left.

     "Your signature, I suppose?" She quips, leaning back with her elbows on the table. "Not bad."

     "I'm spent. It almost felt like . . ."

     "I know. Cigarette?" Then she shows me how to clean the painter's tools, where they go until next time. "Now you know how I feel, and why I do what I do."

     "I hope I didn't mess up your work."

     She studies me for a while. "No, this is one of my moments." She sits on her stool, rolls another cigarette. "I was kind of waiting for something like this to happen."

     "Something like what?"

     "To include you." She nods, "I love you so. Tomorrow I'll finish you, my dear painting."