—32—
Tanveer’s letter about Orientalism in my work weighed on me.
In the cold of a February afternoon, I went to the studio where I had been assigned a small but agreeable area beneath a north-facing window.
My easel was set up with a painting in progress, a rather desultory portrait of a female model, which I hadn’t liked from the beginning and liked less each day.
I glared at it, hands beneath my armpits.
The studio was a shared space, but few other artists were about today, discouraged perhaps by the wet weather or a head cold that had been making its way through our ranks.
A woman I knew very little painted a still life of flowers across the room, and even from this distance, I could see that she had developed her own language of art.
In her brushstrokes, her shapes, the palette she employed, a soft garden-like tone on tone of purples and blues, lilacs in a blue vase.
Sunlight streamed through a window, a single plum dropped by the vase, and a pair of gardening gloves suggested a person just out of scene.
I crossed the room. “Well done.”
In surprise, she looked up. “Thank you.” She was a slight, pale girl with nondescript brown hair. Unremarkable in every way but the way she put light on the canvas.
“I’m struggling,” I confessed. “I’ve wanted to attend art school since I was a small child. Not that I’m doing particularly well.”
She glanced over to my easel, dabbed a whisper of white over the table. “You haven’t found your voice yet. You will.”
It stung, like Tanveer’s words, like the professor telling me the things I painted were no longer in vogue. I watched her for a while, layering light into the scene in the tiniest drops. “I see that you’ve found your voice. I can tell a painting is yours before I see your name.”
“Thank you,” she said with sincerity. “I can recognize yours, as well, but it is because of subject matter. No one else is painting so many Indian characters.”
I sighed. “I know. But that is what I loved painting as a child. That was what was around me! I still think they’re beautiful.”
“Objectively,” she said, leaning in to use a fingernail to remove a millimeter of white from the edge of the vase, “they are beautiful. They’re not yet very authentic is the thing.”
Authentic. A word Tanveer had also used. I sank down on the stool nearby her easel. “What does that even mean? How can I paint what is not authentically mine? How did you find out what was yours to say?”
She paused, wiping her brush clean, obviously considering.
“I’ve painted and drawn flowers for as long as I can remember.
My grandmother raised me, and her greatest joy was in the garden.
” She dropped her brush into a waiting jar.
“When she died, I was a bit lost. I started painting her things. The gloves.” She pointed at a sketch pinned to the wall, showing a hat on a chair.
“Her hat. I think I like that feeling of thinking someone is about to be right back.”
A little sting burned the corners of my eyes. “I see that in your work.” I thought of some of her other paintings, the light, the colors in subdued hues, all very influenced by an English cottage garden. “Huh.”
“You are very talented. No one is hard on you because they want to make it hard. They want you to prove you mean it.”
I ducked my head. “Thank you.” I stood. “You had no reason to be kind to me, but I appreciate it.”
She only nodded.
I headed back to the easel and saw that I still loathed the painting it held. But what did I love? What did I love to paint? How would my voice assert itself on the canvas?
Our paintings were stored in vertical racks against the wall. I marched over to my section. Most were not particularly large, and I propped them up on a waist-high counter, then stood back to look at them side by side.
The first thing I could see was color. Bright, clear, saturated colors, sometimes even straining credulity.
Red and gold, bright cerulean blue, hard desert browns, bright mountain greens.
Saris and fruit and jewels. My preference for vivid colors had come under fire, but other painters used them, or had, and I liked them very much—the Matisse paintings I’d admired at the Post-Impressionist exhibit I’d attended with Florence Mallard; Gauguin and the domestic interiors of Bonnard.
What else? With the voice of Tanveer ringing in my ear, I could see the subject matter was a bit stylized, a bit fairy tale, even if there was truth in them, the truth of things I really had seen with my own eyes—the tea wallah and the women selling aubergines.
Two paintings were slightly different. Drawn from the same memories, but not the same subjects.
The first was the night sky over the palace in the desert, the night we had discussed whether other planets might have many suns.
In the foreground was the party, spilling in light and color into the corner of the painting, while most of the canvas was covered with the sky and stars.
So many, many stars. Two figures stood with heads uptilted, their bodies in silhouette against the night. It felt true.
The other was of Gurdaya as a child, hair down, cross-legged against the backdrop of the pond where we’d learned to swim.
She held a book in her hand and gazed out over the water with a speculative frown.
I’d painted it when I found out she’d had to marry against her will.
Of course I could not send it to her, but it had transmuted my fury to something more peaceful.
As I stood there, looking and looking, Rocky came into the room. We often ate dinner together and talked over the struggles of the day. “What have we here?” he asked, wiping his hands with the cloth that ever hung from his belt.
“I am grappling with what I should be painting. What’s mine and what’s some awful legacy.”
“Ah, the Orientalism.” He nodded, pushing heavy honey-colored hair off his beautiful face. His fingers left streaks of dust on his forehead. “And what do you see?”
I sighed. “I’m afraid there is a bit of imitation going on here, in the marketplace, the portraits. I thought it was real, but maybe it isn’t.”
“Hmm. What else?”
“The colors are bright and saturated, which I know is not the fashion, but it speaks to me in ways all these muted tones do not.” I shook my head. “I don’t even know why that appeals to anyone.”
“Your palette developed in a sunnier, more colorful place.”
“So is that authentic or colonialist?”
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
Pressure built on my chest. “I don’t know!”
“And I, sadly, am not the fellow to help you work this out, as I am fully colonial and have no education in anything else.”
“How am I going to figure this out?”
“I don’t know, dearest, but I have faith in you.” He gestured to the painting of Gurdaya. “I haven’t seen that one.”
“My friend growing up.” I suddenly remembered that she’d been very upset that day before she relaxed into the moment.
“Her brother taught us how to swim in that pond. And I just remembered that she was very afraid of what would happen if anyone found out. I dismissed her worry because I wouldn’t have been in very much trouble. ”
He looked at me, his irises catching the light as he listened. “And she would have.”
“Yes.”
“It is a better painting than the others. Perhaps it’s worth doing more to see why.”
“But what did I do differently?”
“She’s a person you love, not a pretty scene.”
I thought about how I felt, painting her eyes, and it was true—what I’d been painting there was love. Would that help me?
“Come,” he said, flinging an arm around my shoulders. “I’m famished. Let’s find your cousin and a good roast.”
A week later, he appeared again. “Come, sweet, I have an excursion planned.”
I had my sketchbook in my lap, a half-finished drawing lying dead on the page. “I must finish an assignment.”
He tilted his head to look at the work. “No.” He plucked the charcoal from my fingers, and pulled the sketchbook off my lap. “You’ve frozen yourself, and we’re going to fill you up with inspiration.”
“What sort of inspiration?”
“You’ll see. Wash your hands and prepare for sketching. We’ll make a day of it.”
I packed my artist bag with sketchbook, watercolors, a pair of brushes and various drawing utensils. My gray skirt had deep pockets I’d asked mother to sew into it for me, and to avoid unsightly smears and stains, I chose a navy blouse.
“You’re going to get lost in the mire of judgment if you don’t let yourself breathe, Elsie,” he said as we set out. “Today, we’re going to stare at the masters in museums. Your assignment is to simply allow yourself to notice what makes you feel something. When it does, sketch it or make a note.”
I stopped on the pavement. “I fear it will make this even worse, when I see how far I have to go.”
Undaunted, he tucked his hand into my arm. “For today, forget what your work is or what you might eventually accomplish, and let’s just enjoy the work of other artists. We love art!”
“We do.”
“We’re lucky young artists, as well. We know we love the work, and we want to pursue it.”
“Even when it is difficult,” I admitted.
“Yes.” He smiled.
That was exactly what we did. We wandered the great galleries and museums of London for the entire day.
Starting at the Tate, we looked at the masters of portraiture, Sargent and Gainsborough and Hoppner.
I found myself responding to Titian and sketched a pattern of fabric in a Rembrandt, taken by the astonishment of texture.
In the Turner room, Rocky teased me. “Your namesake.” He paused before an enormous seascape with a sky. “He conveys so much emotion.”
I evaluated the painting for the why of the emotion, the interplay of color, the smears of light. Something tight in my heart unfolded. The work was emotional, employing both extravagant and subdued use of color.