—32— #2
At midday we stopped for sausage rolls, then kept exploring.
I particularly sought out anything remotely Orientalist. John Frederick Lewis was highly regarded, and I studied one of his works for a long time, a scene of a Cairo courtyard, women in what I would have called salwar kameez, the screened windows of purdah overhead, desert men in turbans and robes.
“If I love this, am I still not seeing what I need to see about Orientalism?”
“A good question. I do not know how to answer, but let’s study it together.” He crossed his arms over his chest, kicking one foot out in front of him. “What do you see?”
“His use of light is masterful.” I pointed at the sleeve of a woman in front, the glazing of leaves. “And I love the colors, all that primary red and yellow, the patterns in the fabrics.” I continued to study it. “The pigeons give it such a sense of life and movement.”
Rocky nodded. “It’s a masterful work. The details of the bird wings, and the blankets over the camel, and the woman’s scarf.” He pointed out the open window. “I love the woman peering out.”
I kept looking. “The people are all very attractive.”
“Hmm. Yes.”
“And it’s very tidy and clean, which with all those animals and birds, would it be?”
“I want to look at more Orientalists to compare.”
We looked at so many paintings, my mind started to overflow, and as we moved through hallway after gallery after exhibit, I felt the tension in my chest mounting.
I could pinpoint things I loved in all the works we viewed, some more than others, some more in line with my view of the world, some not.
By the time we both declared an end to our capacities, I was awash in a pulsing sense of near despair.
As we strode out into the late afternoon, I stood beneath a tree, overcome.
“Elsie, what is it?”
A man with a truncheon fitted with a bayonet at one end guarded the entrance.
His mustache made him look as if he were frowning—a suffragette had slashed a painting in protest not long ago, and they were all on guard.
I touched my chest, as if I could calm the boiling, and paced away, returned.
Rocky waited, as if he understood my need to collect myself.
Finally I halted and let it all spill out, a tumble of thoughts I couldn’t quite pull together.
“I still don’t see where the line is in my paintings or the Orientalists.
I can see a little, but not all of it? I love how much color there is.
I love those colors. Does that make me a colonialist?
Or am I getting it wrong? And where is the difference in my painting what I loved and experienced, and what’s the—” I pushed my hat off my head, paced, and came back.
“I feel like my heart will explode. I feel that I am a complete failure in my work, that I should never have taken this path at all, but if I don’t paint, am I to just become some obedient little wife, shopping for frocks and throwing parties and—”
He captured my hand and drew me to sit down on a bench in the shade. He kissed my fingers, drew me close to lean on him, and at the contact with his shoulder, I found I could at least breathe.
After a moment, he said, “Firstly, you are an artist, Elsie. You shall always be an artist. That you ask such stark questions is as much an indication of that as anything you paint. You’re questioning the world and yourself in an attempt to find what truth looks like. Art is all deconstruction.”
“But how will I know when I find the actual truth, the heart of truth?”
“Perhaps you will not. Perhaps the questions are the point. The quest is the point.”
At that, I let myself weep a little. Not dramatically, just enough to allow some of the pressure to leak out.
“Let’s get you some tea, shall we?”
Tea always solved everything, I thought, an echo from my father. Tea, which was a crop the British used India to grow. Was it wrong, then, to drink tea? It made my head ache to think of it. Just now, I needed the substance more than the history of it. “Please.”
As we ate cakes and sandwiches in a clever little tearoom, I said, “What do I do next? I’m floundering.”
“That is why we came out today.” He wiped his fingers delicately.
I dropped sugar in my cup, watched it dissolve. Sugar, too, came from the colonies. I sighed. Nearby two men muttered about impending war and the idiocy of the government.
Suddenly, I asked, “Where were the women, Rocky? Do we even think of them?”
“What women?”
“In the museum. On the walls. Where are the women? Did no woman look on those landscapes that Turner painted and long to bring them to life in her way? Were there no women who wanted to capture light like Vermeer?”
“There are some women.”
“One or two perhaps. Out of all the centuries of all the painting in all the world?”
He looked abashed. “I did not even notice.”
“Nor did I! Which is worse, because I am a woman, and a painter!”
He reached across the table and took my hand. His pale irises caught the light from the window. “Elsie, where were the Arab painters? The Indian painters? Did they not look on those same scenes? Did they not wish to paint them?”
I lifted my eyebrows, and sighed. “I did not even notice.”
He gave me a rueful smile.
So many years later, I carried from the closet the paintings I’d begun to work on after that intensely illuminating day.
“I struggled quite a lot my first year at Slade,” I said to my mother, setting them up on the worktable against the wall.
“Rocky challenged me to paint in as many different styles as I could bear for one year. These are some of the experiments.”
I’d tried landscape Pointillism and sky-centric Impressionism and interior Fauvism; flattened the colors and shapes entirely into boxy little brown worlds.
I experimented with the Post-Impressionist styles of Cézanne and Matisse.
The paintings were wildly different with different palettes.
There was not a single rendering of India or Indian subjects, not even Tanveer, but they all had in common the viewpoint of a female painter, seeing things.
“I see you in this work, Elsie.”
“So do I, actually. I started to let go of what I thought I was or should be, and just started learning what I liked.”
“I would like to take the one of the table down—”
Outside, the sirens began to bleat. “Let’s get you down to the sitting room.”
“Get the painting first,” she insisted, pointing.
It was an Impressionist interior of the desk in the room I lived in whilst at Slade.
An open letter lay on the table in a pool of lamplight, with a half-finished sheet of paper with a pen on top of it.
Neither letter was legible, but I remembered them clearly.
I’d been writing to Tanveer, or he’d been writing to me.
And then he had come to London with his father.