It's the holiday season. We're crowding around heaters, fires, television screens, and covering in blankets. Couches are paradise, and with hot tea or hot chocolate elixir, we can watch ourselves breathe. But there's not much else we can do.
Times like these call for a story. You know a lot of people have a favourite story, one they are so absolutely in love with, they must tell it again and again.
Some of us tell our stories with élan, unconcerned that others present might have heard the story hundreds of times before, convinced that this story is so awesome, that the entire audience is truly glad we told the story for the n plus 1th time. We tell our story as an oration, a ritual declaration, complete with accentuated hand gestures, and delicate over-emphasis on the pauses. Social ties will be re-affirmed through references to other recitations, "The first time I told your dad this story, he was about your age..." and as a true priest, the narrator will guide us through an allegory, of which more often than not, he's the protagonist. Yay for him!
Some of us are a little less important, in our own estimation. We might acknowledge the burden of hearing our story repeatedly, and quietly only select new-comers to the group for such revelations, an initiation if you will, "Now, did your old man ever mention the time when..." etc. Couched in the form of information that is both essential and restricted to a certain group, tribal secrets are disclosed. Embarrassed giggles, rolling of the eyes, and other diversionary tactics are employed to play down the desperation of what is happening. A glass of fine wine might be used as a bribe.
Then of course there are those of us who feel, if a story is called a joke, and narrated with a lot of thigh-slapping and garrulous laughter, it is kind of okay to repeat, repeatedly, "Hey Kiddo, you wanna hear a funny story... about how yer old man got his asssssss…oh sorry... um... his buttocks beaten?" Notice the dangling carrot of a joke on one's father, and the not-so-accidental use of ‘adult language'.
I too have a story. But never knew how to tell it. It wasn't a great story, really. I think its only merit is that it is true. But what is funny, is that many people have asked me questions to which the truthful answer would be this story, but I have never told it before. I have wanted to, badly, on many occasions. I could never decide on how to tell the story. Since I would be telling the story for the first time, I knew how I would tell it, say the tenth time, but the first time had me stumped. So instead of telling the truth, I made something up. The first time I did this, it was quite an accident. My guest asked me something, and since the truth would have been quite an unromantic answer, I replaced it with another one (and judging by how the rest of the visit progressed, the right one...). I enjoyed doing this so much that I decided I would always lie in answer to that question. But the more lies I told, and the more success I had with my lies, (and not just romantic success) I fell more in love with the true story, the telling of which was made more elusive with each lie.
The question, to end one part of the curiosity I hope I have managed to build up, is "How did you come to paint this?" The ‘This' in question is a 7x4 canvas that hangs above the fire place in my drawing room. It is framed in ebony, and the only household object whose state of upkeep I take personal interest in is the undisturbed transparence of the glass sheet that protects it from the world. The painting as I can describe it is a set of circles, well not circles, but circular blots that combine to form the perfect silhouette of the female form, with an arm outstretched, as though she were supporting herself using a tree, or doorpost. I told the first guest who asked me this question that her own physical perfection had informed the strokes of my brush. That I put the paints on the canvas with no thought to their location, and focused on her beauty, and personality (no one falls for a shallow man) and let the brush ‘flow'. I found my cheekiness so surprising and amusing, I almost broke out into a grin. But my guest was looking at the canvas as though it was prophecy, so I camouflaged the rising giggle in my throat as an emotional lump, and continued, saying how I chose colours based on her personality, her smile, her long luxuriant hair etc, etc.
Yes, I agree I was overdoing it. But I couldn't believe how seriously she was willing to take me. But to be honest, we didn't know each other well, and being the inspiration for anything seems a huge compliment. But still, man, who talks like that? Apparently soulful artist-types do, I wouldn't know... So I concluded my narration by comparing the brightness of the yellow blotch to her smile, and the fertile green blotch in the centre to her fertile childbearing womb. Things got steamy after that in a way I thought was only possible in movies starring Leonardo Di Caprio.
So that was the first lie, if you will. The truth is much more prosaic, and is described perfectly by the cartoonist Scott Adams' definition of art - creativity is making mistakes, Art is knowing which ones to keep. Yup, I'm using a cartoonist's definition of art, critics go rot in hell!!!
Anyway, so the real story of how that canvas came to look that way is... Well, my lady guest had promised to visit me, if I made her a painting. I had skillfully suggested under the influence of something or the other, that I dabbled in pigments and canvas. Yes I really digged this woman. So I had set about to go from a little worse than Dilbert to Dali in the matter of the time my heart could stand being apart.
I armed myself with what the assistant at the store assured me, were the best oil paints, and the whitest canvasses. I was a little skeptical about the turpentine, I must admit. I mean if I needed translucent liquid colour for something like say glass, I couldn't use oil, it wasn't thick enough, and if I could indeed use oil, then why not water? When the assistant explained to me as best as he could, that the turpentine was meant to replace water in the very process of painting, I was sure he was conning me. I went to a fairly decent school, we had art classes, taught by an art teacher, not some disguised computer or history teacher who wanted overtime, and she never said anything about oil being used instead of water. But the way the assistant told me about turpentine and that slight sneer of impatience, the kind of gentle irritation that a slow child elicits made me shut up. I told him to give me a complete set, it didn't matter. Then he asked me what brushes I wanted. I informed him with a straight back, head up high, and the sheer confidence of infallibility that being a customer bestows upon one, that I wanted a set.
My tone made it quite clear that I didn't want to be asked any stupid questions, or questions that made me sound stupid, and would as a consequence meekly accept whatever he picked out as a complete set, and pay for it, and leave as soon as possible. Naturally, he liked the situation. Once home, I had someone set up two easels in the drawing room, and giggling at the stereotype of it all, lifted a bowl of fruit to a low table set a little distance away but between my two canvases. I got out my paints, my brushes, my turpentine oil, and my palette, which the assistant had suggested as an after-thought, rubbing salt into already grazed skin. I think it was this that inspired the cheekiness with which I have approached paints ever since. I'm still trying to get back at him. So petty, I know. But also very delightful, it has been.
So I had been wrestling with a couple of brushes and the murderous difficulty of drawing a consistent curve. Not to mention making two adjacent brush strokes look similar enough to blend, and subtle changes of shade. To be honest, I was kind of where a long oblong yellow shape is a banana and the biggest blot you could create by over loading your brush with paint of a particular colour, represented the round fruit. Green represented the guava which was placed in the centre of the bowl, and was to become a fertile womb, rounded, but slightly oblong, because it was actually two blobs next to each other- the red apples, and of course above both was the orange orange, which I ended up painting with a yellow, because apparently I don't understand what colour labels mean. The tube was labelled ‘Sunrise', and I figured they meant before sunrise, but once I got the blob on the canvas, it became obvious they meant just after, which is what inspired the comparison to my guest's 'sunny' smile.
But since at that time I was drawing fruit, and was being forced to accept blobs of almost the right colour, I did the only thing I could do - I gave up. Drawing these few blobs and the oblong yellow shape which I found satisfactorily similar to bananas to call them that, was task enough for me. I was tired. I decided I would take a break and mess up the other canvas just to see what would happen when I put a lot of colours together. The only art technique that I had learnt in school was spray painting with a tooth brush, and I was too tired to make stencils, so it was just free hand spray painting, which meant it was nothing.
But while I was playing around on my second canvas, Elizabeth came by. She was in a mighty hurry, but like all women must be able to, she could appreciate art. So passing through my drawing room, she glanced at the first canvas. She looked at it for a while and then said the most unbelievable words I had ever heard. "My God," she said, "You've drawn the perfect female form. Oh you have to complete this painting... the white spaces offset the contrasting colours. But it's brilliant!" I checked her face. She wasn't grinning.
She walked over to the canvas I was playing on, and very deliberately looked it up and down, and then very thoughtfully said, "You know I never imagined the universe could be such a colourful place... but you're right, colour is in the essence of the cosmos. They make such a strikingly complimentary pair". Then she left.
I took a deep breathe. Then another... there was a female fragrance in the air. I don't have olfactory hallucinations, so I guessed that had really happened. So I took a few steps back from both canvases. The blobby fruit bowl had run colour and melted into a weird shape, which somehow had a tapering waist, leading into the bananas that were now legs, and an arm of what was now brown/bronze, but which had initially been red and green paint following some flaw in the canvas. But saying that was such a stress of imagination, that imagination has never relapsed back to its normal shape, and its elasticity is much reduced. To me it looked like a few messy blobs of paint.
The 'cosmos' comparison actually made sense to me. But hey, anytime you spray paint a piece of anything, stars is what you call ‘em. But well, at least I could sell it to my guest. I still hadn't thought of saying it was her. But Liz was right, I had to figure out how to cover the white spaces. I had no bloody clue. Just then my housekeeper came into the drawing room. She was also an excellent seamstress. An Idea struck.
I asked her how deft she was with a pair of scissors, and she replied with a degree of pride, I felt proud of. So I told her to cut the painted portion out of the first canvas, stick it to the second canvas, and have it done so they looked like they were the same canvas, and then get it framed with thick glass, and placed somewhere where anyone could see it, but not inspect it closely. She did this remarkably efficiently, and a few days before the arrival of my guest, my creation was suspended from a very serious-looking hook, above my fire place.
Alright... well you know the rest of the story.
But so enduring has been the label of art on that piece of luck, that a critic from an academy came down to take a photograph of it for a piece in their annual journal, where it appeared in the article "Environmental Art - A Plea to Re-Fertilize the Planet". (I really do love that green).
Times like these call for a story. You know a lot of people have a favourite story, one they are so absolutely in love with, they must tell it again and again.
Some of us tell our stories with élan, unconcerned that others present might have heard the story hundreds of times before, convinced that this story is so awesome, that the entire audience is truly glad we told the story for the n plus 1th time. We tell our story as an oration, a ritual declaration, complete with accentuated hand gestures, and delicate over-emphasis on the pauses. Social ties will be re-affirmed through references to other recitations, "The first time I told your dad this story, he was about your age..." and as a true priest, the narrator will guide us through an allegory, of which more often than not, he's the protagonist. Yay for him!
Some of us are a little less important, in our own estimation. We might acknowledge the burden of hearing our story repeatedly, and quietly only select new-comers to the group for such revelations, an initiation if you will, "Now, did your old man ever mention the time when..." etc. Couched in the form of information that is both essential and restricted to a certain group, tribal secrets are disclosed. Embarrassed giggles, rolling of the eyes, and other diversionary tactics are employed to play down the desperation of what is happening. A glass of fine wine might be used as a bribe.
Then of course there are those of us who feel, if a story is called a joke, and narrated with a lot of thigh-slapping and garrulous laughter, it is kind of okay to repeat, repeatedly, "Hey Kiddo, you wanna hear a funny story... about how yer old man got his asssssss…oh sorry... um... his buttocks beaten?" Notice the dangling carrot of a joke on one's father, and the not-so-accidental use of ‘adult language'.
I too have a story. But never knew how to tell it. It wasn't a great story, really. I think its only merit is that it is true. But what is funny, is that many people have asked me questions to which the truthful answer would be this story, but I have never told it before. I have wanted to, badly, on many occasions. I could never decide on how to tell the story. Since I would be telling the story for the first time, I knew how I would tell it, say the tenth time, but the first time had me stumped. So instead of telling the truth, I made something up. The first time I did this, it was quite an accident. My guest asked me something, and since the truth would have been quite an unromantic answer, I replaced it with another one (and judging by how the rest of the visit progressed, the right one...). I enjoyed doing this so much that I decided I would always lie in answer to that question. But the more lies I told, and the more success I had with my lies, (and not just romantic success) I fell more in love with the true story, the telling of which was made more elusive with each lie.
The question, to end one part of the curiosity I hope I have managed to build up, is "How did you come to paint this?" The ‘This' in question is a 7x4 canvas that hangs above the fire place in my drawing room. It is framed in ebony, and the only household object whose state of upkeep I take personal interest in is the undisturbed transparence of the glass sheet that protects it from the world. The painting as I can describe it is a set of circles, well not circles, but circular blots that combine to form the perfect silhouette of the female form, with an arm outstretched, as though she were supporting herself using a tree, or doorpost. I told the first guest who asked me this question that her own physical perfection had informed the strokes of my brush. That I put the paints on the canvas with no thought to their location, and focused on her beauty, and personality (no one falls for a shallow man) and let the brush ‘flow'. I found my cheekiness so surprising and amusing, I almost broke out into a grin. But my guest was looking at the canvas as though it was prophecy, so I camouflaged the rising giggle in my throat as an emotional lump, and continued, saying how I chose colours based on her personality, her smile, her long luxuriant hair etc, etc.
Yes, I agree I was overdoing it. But I couldn't believe how seriously she was willing to take me. But to be honest, we didn't know each other well, and being the inspiration for anything seems a huge compliment. But still, man, who talks like that? Apparently soulful artist-types do, I wouldn't know... So I concluded my narration by comparing the brightness of the yellow blotch to her smile, and the fertile green blotch in the centre to her fertile childbearing womb. Things got steamy after that in a way I thought was only possible in movies starring Leonardo Di Caprio.
So that was the first lie, if you will. The truth is much more prosaic, and is described perfectly by the cartoonist Scott Adams' definition of art - creativity is making mistakes, Art is knowing which ones to keep. Yup, I'm using a cartoonist's definition of art, critics go rot in hell!!!
Anyway, so the real story of how that canvas came to look that way is... Well, my lady guest had promised to visit me, if I made her a painting. I had skillfully suggested under the influence of something or the other, that I dabbled in pigments and canvas. Yes I really digged this woman. So I had set about to go from a little worse than Dilbert to Dali in the matter of the time my heart could stand being apart.
I armed myself with what the assistant at the store assured me, were the best oil paints, and the whitest canvasses. I was a little skeptical about the turpentine, I must admit. I mean if I needed translucent liquid colour for something like say glass, I couldn't use oil, it wasn't thick enough, and if I could indeed use oil, then why not water? When the assistant explained to me as best as he could, that the turpentine was meant to replace water in the very process of painting, I was sure he was conning me. I went to a fairly decent school, we had art classes, taught by an art teacher, not some disguised computer or history teacher who wanted overtime, and she never said anything about oil being used instead of water. But the way the assistant told me about turpentine and that slight sneer of impatience, the kind of gentle irritation that a slow child elicits made me shut up. I told him to give me a complete set, it didn't matter. Then he asked me what brushes I wanted. I informed him with a straight back, head up high, and the sheer confidence of infallibility that being a customer bestows upon one, that I wanted a set.
My tone made it quite clear that I didn't want to be asked any stupid questions, or questions that made me sound stupid, and would as a consequence meekly accept whatever he picked out as a complete set, and pay for it, and leave as soon as possible. Naturally, he liked the situation. Once home, I had someone set up two easels in the drawing room, and giggling at the stereotype of it all, lifted a bowl of fruit to a low table set a little distance away but between my two canvases. I got out my paints, my brushes, my turpentine oil, and my palette, which the assistant had suggested as an after-thought, rubbing salt into already grazed skin. I think it was this that inspired the cheekiness with which I have approached paints ever since. I'm still trying to get back at him. So petty, I know. But also very delightful, it has been.
So I had been wrestling with a couple of brushes and the murderous difficulty of drawing a consistent curve. Not to mention making two adjacent brush strokes look similar enough to blend, and subtle changes of shade. To be honest, I was kind of where a long oblong yellow shape is a banana and the biggest blot you could create by over loading your brush with paint of a particular colour, represented the round fruit. Green represented the guava which was placed in the centre of the bowl, and was to become a fertile womb, rounded, but slightly oblong, because it was actually two blobs next to each other- the red apples, and of course above both was the orange orange, which I ended up painting with a yellow, because apparently I don't understand what colour labels mean. The tube was labelled ‘Sunrise', and I figured they meant before sunrise, but once I got the blob on the canvas, it became obvious they meant just after, which is what inspired the comparison to my guest's 'sunny' smile.
But since at that time I was drawing fruit, and was being forced to accept blobs of almost the right colour, I did the only thing I could do - I gave up. Drawing these few blobs and the oblong yellow shape which I found satisfactorily similar to bananas to call them that, was task enough for me. I was tired. I decided I would take a break and mess up the other canvas just to see what would happen when I put a lot of colours together. The only art technique that I had learnt in school was spray painting with a tooth brush, and I was too tired to make stencils, so it was just free hand spray painting, which meant it was nothing.
But while I was playing around on my second canvas, Elizabeth came by. She was in a mighty hurry, but like all women must be able to, she could appreciate art. So passing through my drawing room, she glanced at the first canvas. She looked at it for a while and then said the most unbelievable words I had ever heard. "My God," she said, "You've drawn the perfect female form. Oh you have to complete this painting... the white spaces offset the contrasting colours. But it's brilliant!" I checked her face. She wasn't grinning.
She walked over to the canvas I was playing on, and very deliberately looked it up and down, and then very thoughtfully said, "You know I never imagined the universe could be such a colourful place... but you're right, colour is in the essence of the cosmos. They make such a strikingly complimentary pair". Then she left.
I took a deep breathe. Then another... there was a female fragrance in the air. I don't have olfactory hallucinations, so I guessed that had really happened. So I took a few steps back from both canvases. The blobby fruit bowl had run colour and melted into a weird shape, which somehow had a tapering waist, leading into the bananas that were now legs, and an arm of what was now brown/bronze, but which had initially been red and green paint following some flaw in the canvas. But saying that was such a stress of imagination, that imagination has never relapsed back to its normal shape, and its elasticity is much reduced. To me it looked like a few messy blobs of paint.
The 'cosmos' comparison actually made sense to me. But hey, anytime you spray paint a piece of anything, stars is what you call ‘em. But well, at least I could sell it to my guest. I still hadn't thought of saying it was her. But Liz was right, I had to figure out how to cover the white spaces. I had no bloody clue. Just then my housekeeper came into the drawing room. She was also an excellent seamstress. An Idea struck.
I asked her how deft she was with a pair of scissors, and she replied with a degree of pride, I felt proud of. So I told her to cut the painted portion out of the first canvas, stick it to the second canvas, and have it done so they looked like they were the same canvas, and then get it framed with thick glass, and placed somewhere where anyone could see it, but not inspect it closely. She did this remarkably efficiently, and a few days before the arrival of my guest, my creation was suspended from a very serious-looking hook, above my fire place.
Alright... well you know the rest of the story.
But so enduring has been the label of art on that piece of luck, that a critic from an academy came down to take a photograph of it for a piece in their annual journal, where it appeared in the article "Environmental Art - A Plea to Re-Fertilize the Planet". (I really do love that green).
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