The Underpainter (19 page)

I tramped along sullenly behind her. At one point she spun around and faced me on the path, real anger in her eyes. “Why don’t you ever say anything?” she demanded. “Tell me what you’re looking at, what you’re listening to.”

“It’s not in my nature to say anything,” I replied testily. A battalion of mosquitoes was circling my head. I wanted to be back inside the stillness of the room, shading the curve of her hip with my pencil.

“Is it in your nature to feel anything, I sometimes wonder?”

“What is this all about?” I asked. “Of course I can feel things. I get angry. I get hurt. I’m an artist, for Christ’s sake, I feel things all the time, and I’m beginning to feel angry now.”

“You feel things privately.”

“Yes, privately. What’s the matter with that? I’m not going to spend my life burdening other people with my emotions.”

“I am talking about feelings … not some fit of anger, some temper tantrum.”

“Anger is a feeling.”

“You know very well there’s a difference.”

Yes, I knew very well there was a difference. Sara was searching the map of my character for the place where my heart was hidden, but I was so busy guarding the site I failed to notice there were no weapons in the hands of the woman who approached it.

We returned to the Landing in silence and then we parted at the wharf. I stood facing the water for a full hour, watching the lake gradually calm and playing my teacher’s final statement on the character of the artist over and over in my mind.

“The wise draughtsman brings forward only that which he can use most effectively to present his case,” Robert H. had said. And isolates whatever he brings forward, I thought, as I turned away from the view for just a moment to watch Sara’s lone figure move down the edge of the shore towards her house.

That night the temperature fell dramatically. The next day the whole world had changed colour.

The north-shore birch is a discreet tree in most seasons. In winter, Sara told me, it practically disappears, having lost its leaves and exposed its branches, which are almost as pale as the surrounding snow. In summer its soft-green foliage blends easily into the darker greens of the pines. But in the fall, as I discovered that year, it dominates whatever region it occupies.

I awoke the morning after our walk in the forest to thousands of bright golden leaves, a season quite unlike the multicoloured
autumns I was familiar with in upstate New York. It caught me off guard. I was not in any way prepared for it. There were several birches in the vicinity of Sara’s house, and I wondered how this radical change of tone would affect the indoor light. Walking down the shore road the water was darker — almost vine black — the sky cerulean blue, the pines cobalt green in the face of this brilliance. Beside the log wall of Sara’s house the red berries of a mountain ash looked exotic, tropical, out of place.

She was reading on the sofa near the open parlour window. At her feet lay an orange mass I couldn’t at first identify. Then a small, intense face looked directly into mine for a fraction of a second before the animal leapt over the window sill and disappeared into the trees.

“A fox,” I said, stunned.

She looked up from her book calmly. “Yes,” she said.

“A fox in your house,” I said stupidly. There was something shocking to me about the wild having come inside these walls, walls that I believed were meant to keep the wild out.

“He always comes,” she said, “when the trees turn”

I kept looking out the window through which the fox had disappeared.

“Well, for the last five years or so,” Sara continued. “He comes when the trees turn and after the summer people leave. You’ve never been here to see him before. He waits until the summer people are gone, then he comes in the morning for something to eat. Sometimes he stays all morning. Often we’ll go for a walk.”

“A walk. You and the fox go for a walk.”

“Yes, like the one you and I took yesterday. He probably saw us, but he wouldn’t have come near because of you. Sometimes in the winter he comes at night, particularly if there is a moon. Occasionally he sleeps at the end of my bed.”

“You never told me.” I had known this woman for years at this point, and yet I had not sensed in her the ability to tame something wild.

I realized I had never really pictured this place in the winter. I had never even thought about the lake, a birch tree, this log house, with ice and snow surrounding it, a fox in the moonlight trotting silently towards Sara’s lit windows. “How is it possible that you tamed a fox?” I asked.

“He is not tame.” Sara closed the book, placed it on the table beside the sofa. Then she sat up and regarded me with that steady, frank look that so often preceded something significant that she wanted to say. Something she wanted me to pay particular attention to. I did not meet her gaze for longer than a split second, looked instead at the table, the book she held on her lap. She was reading Anthony Trollope. “It is not necessary to tame a creature to love it,” she said. “To have it love you.”

I took Sara that morning to her father’s room and posed her near the east window, where both the yellow birch trees and the scarlet berries of the mountain ash were visible through the glass. There was no noise at all from the lake now. Golden light shone through the quivering leaves, entered the room, warmed her skin.

She watched as I mixed together some cadmium orange and cadmium yellow, two of the most intense colours on earth. I was
working on a small canvas. Watercolour would never have been able to mirror the heat of those colours, the gold of her skin.

“Don’t put the fox in the painting,” she said.

“I’ve never painted animals. You know that.”

“He doesn’t belong to you.” She shifted in the chair, changing the pose slightly. “You never would have seen him at all if you hadn’t stayed.”

U
nlike Rockwell, who was always trying to shed the city — in spite of his love for it — always trying to shed it so that he could disappear into weather and open country, Robert Henri spoke infrequently about landscape.

But when he did, he talked about its “motive,” how it arranged itself in the visual imagination of the artist. He wanted everything on the picture plane to be expression or idea: the impenetrability of rock, the flexibility of wood and leaf. He told us never to paint informationally, as if we were saying, “There is a hill; here is a sunset.” He wanted to get past the hill, the sky, to be rid of them, to leave an atmosphere or an idea, or both, in the scene’s place, wanted all the freight carried in the mind of the artist exposed.

In the end, we painted ourselves over and over.

How we loved him, loved the way he led us to believe in the brilliance of our own singular eye, as if we were the models and the subject were painting us. He was honestly convinced, I think, that the whole purpose of daylight was to reveal a world capable
of calling forth an acceptable response from his pupils. This relationship, this sense that the artist owns, controls, and is therefore free to manipulate any subject — animate or inanimate — any subject that has, however casually, caught his attention, was the centrepiece of his philosophy.

And yet he demanded an utterly detailed knowledge of the subject. He said he loathed the fact that landscape lent itself so easily to the sentimental, the picturesque, but, essentially, it was too large for the cold intimacy he required. “I would rather see a wonderful little child than the Grand Canyon,” he would often announce. The truth is — it has taken me all these years to see it — the truth is that neither Robert nor any of the rest of us could manipulate the Grand Canyon. It refused to become intimate with us, to mirror our souls, to encourage our vanity.

And what became of us all, the children that he fathered? Eventually, we staggered out of his New York studios, away from his models and still lifes. Some went to paint the streets, the tenements and factories, some migrated upstate to paint grim houses and cold fields, and a few, like myself, were drawn to the northern wilderness, despite our teacher’s warnings about landscape, wanting in our egocentricity to test our powers on the least responsive subject of all.

There was a great fashion among artists in the early decades of the century for groups and organizations — the New York Eight, the Whitney Club, The Art Students’ League, the Canadian Group of Seven, and the like — so it was not unusual for three or four or even more men to go off together to the sea or the forest to paint in the summer. But I was never comfortable in a collective, having allowed the eye/I of Robert H.’s teaching
to establish itself in my head and heart. I wanted no interference from the confusing vision of others. Jealously hoarding my own experiences, the intimacy I courted became an invasion, almost a form of rape. I absorbed everything I could, used it in my art, but gave nothing of myself in return.

But I never lost sight of the notion that an artist must never let technique move beyond the edges of his peripheral vision, regardless of whatever else might concern him at the time. Like viewing one’s own fortified village from a valley during the Middle Ages, the gorgeous green of the grass, the deep, engrossing colour of the flowers, clouds throwing shadows on the opposite hillside, the possibility of unicorns: all this should attract and delight. But one must keep the village, the walls, and gates — the structure, the method — all of the protection and shelter in view, otherwise one will not get back before dark, before the invading armies appear on the horizon. One may venture out into the valleys, out into colour and texture, but the truth is, the fortified village is where one really lives.

Nowadays it is fashionable to refer to what a painting is “about.” Although I dislike the term, and firmly believe I am no follower of fashion, I would have to say that the paintings I have produced over the period of the last decade or so are “about” both revelation and obscuration. This has presented me with some problems. I need to have made a realistic rendering of the details of the subject, otherwise the whole process would be fraudulent for the simple reason that in order to be obscured these images need to have existed in the first place. And not just in my own mind. My own memory. I wanted to concretize the images, turn them into the kind of physical realities that occupy
space and suggest depth — however illusory. Then I wanted the physical reality veiled.

This was not a simple task. It wasn’t long before I discovered that the underpainting — the original scene — was going to be at least as crucial as the overpainting, not only intellectually but also visually since I had decided that carefully chosen parts of its line, form, and composition were to be faintly visible in the completed painting. I was plagued for months, however, by premonitions of pentimenti: those ghosts of formerly rendered shapes that the artist had intended to paint out forever. In the future, I feared, they would rise to the surfaces of my pictures like drowned corpses, bloated and obscene, regardless of glazes or the number of layers of zinc white, titanium white, and lead white I applied to the canvases.

This nagged me while I was finishing the underpainting, made me wary of intensity; even though I was convinced that certain scenes demanded to be painted in bright pigments. Also there were several night views that I wanted to include that would have necessitated the use of lamp black, charcoal black, umbers and ochres, all reliable permanent colours and therefore difficult to cover up. The more fugitive colours, ultramarines and cadmiums, brought with them their own set of problems: chemical changes, fading, darkening — all potentially capable of affecting the surface above.

When I was a boy there was only one painting in our house. It had been done by a great-aunt on my father’s side and depicted two dogs lying near a hill on which a rosebush flourished. My mother allowed it, I think, because it was so primitively drawn that it resembled very little the fixed images of the photographs
of which she was so suspicious. I, on the other hand, was quite afraid of it, being able to discern a third dog — a dark ghost — emerging from the hill. I knew the dog wasn’t meant to be there, that he was a mistake, and that I shouldn’t be able to see him at all. I knew that the woman who had painted this ominous beast had been dead for a long, long time, and it seemed to me that her dead hand was attempting to change the painting before my very eyes. I wasn’t certain whether other people could see the third dog, and was afraid to ask them if they could, didn’t want to confirm my suspicion that this evidence of an ill-considered action from the past was meant for my instruction alone. What I dreaded more than anything was the possibility that one day I might awaken to find the concealed dog utterly visible on the canvas, his fur sleek, his eyes shining.

A few years ago, I finally put my fears concerning pentimenti almost to rest by devising a technique that I hope will be foolproof. Once the underpainting has been completed in great detail, and is fully dry, I make what I call a “colour diary” of the work on a long piece of paper. This comprises a series of small squares beginning with the colour of the most intensity and ending with the colour of the least intensity. Then I pin this on the wall beside the painting and apply a thin glaze of the most intense colour to the entire canvas. When that layer is perfectly dry, I repeat the process with the colour of next greatest intensity, allow it to dry, and begin again, over and over, until I have reached the colour of least intensity. All of this takes a great deal of time, which explains why I can complete only four or five of these pieces in any given year.