Painting with Light (Part 1)

It started like the kiss of a butterfly wing – air brushing against his fingertips. The sensation reminded him of his mother, like she was moving through the room. As he picked up his cup of tea he noticed a slight tremor on the surface of the liquid. A slight tremor, that was all, a sensation so completely foreign to him, so different from what he knew about his body that he experienced it as an external stimulus. 

He took a few sips of tea. It was already a bit cold as he had got busy. When he put the cup down he looked at his hands. His fingers carried layers of paint, the new on top of the old, a cryptic history, an afterimage of his craft. Silvery white paint lay deep in the old creases, splotches and flecks of indigo and violet and canary yellow. Smears on fingertips when he hastily lifted an errant drop of oil paint, later to be rubbed off on his work jeans. Not his shirts, white and crisp. It was a minor obsession of his to keep his shirts pristine, a reminder that beauty was less about perfection than about context. 

Strong. Trustworthy. The hands tell a story, and as he looked at his hands, bemused at the slight tremor he felt, he retraced the story of the lines crisscrossing his palms, the callouses, the proud arteries flowing from his wrist into his meaty thumb. And even while he read from this personal history on his left hand, his right hand was at play, tapping a rote rhythm on the table beside him. Always a movement. Not restlessness, no, but if he would stop, the unease would come. No, this was a seeking mind made visible, a creative emergent curiosity, goalless but sure. 

The sunlight peeked in at the window of his studio. This early in the morning he often lit a candle to banish the darkest shadow from the room, but he always waited for the golden light of the first rays of sunshine before doing more detailed work. A miracle. When the light came through the window, it contained the essence of new life, reflections of dew-dropped grass, the curious olive thrush with its distinctive hop, hop and dash through the undergrowth, gilded clouds and shaled roofs and glittering otters on the riverbank. 

The sunlight came through the thick glass, slightly warped and bubbled, and hit the wooden cupboard where he kept his paints and brushes and cleaning materials. It hit the high wooden beams and set the room to a warm glow and gave him a thrill, even after all these many years. Then he painted without caution or hesitation, knowing the paint he put down on the canvas with his brushes, with his fingers, came from within him. It was the product of his imagination, an expression of his emotions and state of mind. It flowed, it was his skill and vision combining into a thing with substance and texture and a point of view. Sometimes. 

What surprised him then was that his paintings never had a clear starting point and he seldom put paint down with an end result in mind. He did try, a few times, to paint from his mind’s eye, like he knew many of his contemporaries did. He kept these – hidden in the store room stacked on top of each other unframed. They never felt right. 

It started with a tremor like the flap of a butterfly’s wing on his fingertips. Over the course of weeks or months – he couldn’t really say how long – the sensation deepened, intensified, became a weakness in his wrists. And the tremor sometimes persisted until he dropped his hand to the table or rested his wrist directly on the canvas. 

Now his wrists became smeared with paint. Forgetting sometimes, he smudged new brush strokes and he had to scrape all the paint off and start again to get the right thickness, the right movement in the brush strokes. 

Then one morning, as the sun’s first rays hit the wooden cupboard and roof beams, as he sat in his nook with a cup of tea in front of his canvas, as he studied what he had been working on for the last few days, he shook his head. He looked at his hands. They still looked the same. They still spoke of his craft and experience to those who knew how to listen. 

“We’ll have to learn a new language,” he thought. Paint smeared his wrists. His callouses had softened. For years they had conspired in creativity, his curious mind the custodian of experience and yearning, and his eager hands the mute executors of his will. “My heart is aching from all of the things still left unsaid, everything that I used to put down on canvas. I can’t trust you to translate for me, anymore,” he thought to his hands. They trembled in response.

He didn’t hear her come in. He noticed a shift in the light first, an echo of movement. She touched his shoulder where he still sat with his head bowed. He knew she was appraising his work, comparing it with what he had done before. And without her saying anything, he felt her judgement, pity, even. He picked up his half-full cup of tea and hurled it against the canvas. Tea splashed everywhere. His mug fell to the floor and shattered. 

He stood up and kicked the easel with force. His big toe flared in pain. The easel collapsed from the strike; the canvas it held tumbled to the floor and landed face down. “Fuck!” he swore in his head. “Fucking idiot,” he swore at himself. 

She came to him, turned him around and put his head on her shoulders. Then after a while she helped him clean up. She picked up the shards of the broken mug and wiped the floor clean. He set the easel upright again and put the canvas back in place. He would need to wait for the canvas to dry. 

He did continue painting for a time, and he did learn a new language of sorts: a private, slow language that only his mind and his hands understood. Slow, because he needed more time to rest. Slow, because even though he worked carefully, his hands would not always obey him. 

Until one morning. As on most days, he woke up before sunrise. He stumbled to the toilet to urinate and wash his face, then he revived the fire under the cast-iron stove in the kitchen and put on the kettle. While he waited for the water to boil, he lit a candle and walked to his studio. The flame trembled. He set it down on the side table, looked at the canvas on the easel. So close. Just the final details were left to be done. 

It was a portrait of his wife, a scene from decades ago. She as a young woman in a summer dress among the wheat fields on her parents’ farm. A hot sun, the shimmering wheat, the way she looked at him that day: impish and curious and direct. Her breasts unencumbered, proud as she challenged him with her still innocent desire. He remembered it as the day she first considered him in the same way he thought about her. The day she started wanting more than friendship. 

As he prepared his tea he found it difficult to calm his hands. The cold did that, now. His right hand shook when he picked up the kettle. He steadied himself by putting his elbow on the table. Some of the hot water spilled as he poured it into the tea pot. When he poured the brewed tea into his mug, he spilled again. He picked up the mug with both hands. They were shaking. Slowly he walked, tea breaching the rim and dripping onto the floor. He set the mug down next to the candle and wiped his hands on his jeans. 

He started mixing pigment, using a small palette knife to scoop up small amounts of blue, white and green powders. He worked automatically, adding walnut oil from a flask and working the mixture into a smooth paste. More blue, just a touch. 

And he picked up a small brush, a fine brush with ten short soft hairs tightly bunched. His friend Tómas made his brushes and had done so since he started painting all those years ago. Tómas’s brushes were expensive, yes, but their bristles never fell out and they were just the right thickness and flexibility. His grip on the brush felt weak. 

He held the brush to the mixed paint: just a small amount was needed now. Slowly, slowly, with great effort he dabbed the brush into the paint. Now for the difficult part. He closed his eyes to remember how the light fell over her face and reflected from her eyes, those sparkling gemstones containing galaxies within her irises.

She came to him later in the day. He would normally have come to the kitchen for breakfast, but when he was feeling inspired he sometimes continued working. She went to him carrying a hot mug of tea and some biscuits. She set it down, noticing the untouched mug from earlier in the day. She pulled up a stool to sit next to him. In his hand he still held the fine brush. The paint had dried on it, the fine hairs bound by a droplet of colour. 

She had not seen this painting before but she immediately recognised herself and her old family farm. She remembered that day when she finally started revealing to him how she felt, too cautious before in case he did not return her feelings. 

He sat with his head almost on his knees, as if in prayer. “I can’t finish it,” he said. 

She knew better than to question him about it. To her eyes his interpretation of that day was awe-inspiring. It captured the light stirring in the wheat, the hot sun and scudding clouds in a blue sky, the olive tree on the rocky outcrop behind her. She experienced anew the emotions of that day as she stood there, challenging him with her posture, her gaze, to kiss her. One detail differed from her memory: she carried an unruly pink dahlia in her hand. She found it remarkable that he could still work so carefully. Each petal must have taken him a day, at least. 

As if sensing her question, he started talking, still with his head bowed. “You carried our love. I was reckless with it. I took you for granted. I neglected you, gave you cold pride and hard silence. Still you held on, brought me back, showed me how easy love is in the wild places.” He cried then, his face contorting as if in pain. Later he continued. “I do not dare touch your eyes for fear of destroying them. I can’t, anymore.” He showed her the brush. His hand shook uncontrollably, and when she held his hands to comfort him, to still him, his body quaked as he sobbed.

He never painted again. That same day he cleaned his brushes, put away his pigments and oils in the wooden cupboard. When he closed the door that afternoon, his mind recoiled. He had never closed that door. That afternoon his hands took control and his mind followed.