The Forest Lover (20 page)

“Humph. When's he coming?”

“Saturday.”

“Five in one week! I'd have to slapdash them to get five.”

Bridget patted Emily's cheek. “Maybe that's the point.”

• • •

In the morning, Emily followed a hedge between wheat and corn fields to a cliff. The rumble of waves and the
kleeuw, kleeuw
of gulls sounded like the beach at Sophie's house. She'd paint right here so she could listen to them. She turned to face the high, open countryside and made a composition of two farmers in yellow straw hats mending a plow in front of a stone farmhouse. The next day, the patchwork fields drenched in golds and greens liberated her to use the brilliant Fauve palette. If she could have painted the smell of heather, she'd have splashed that on too. Later, a milkmaid with scratched legs switching her black and white cow held still for her. An old church, pared down to its peaked roof, arched doorway, and stubby dome, was the first painting she showed Gibb.

“Good. You're more assertive with form on that church, like
Cézanne,” Gibb said when he saw it. “You're taking risks with unnatural color. Clumsy, but it has energy. That is to say, it has soul.”

“How do I get rid of the clumsiness?”

He looked at her blankly. “Work.”

• • •

“Bonjour, madame,”
Emily sang out every day to a stout peasant who greeted her from her garden. One Sunday when Emily passed by, the woman patted her chest and said, “Héloïse.” She was wearing a wide white headdress with starched wings. Emily pointed to it and held up a paintbrush. Héloïse's face turned rosy, her hands flitted like butterflies, and she brought out her knitting and a chair. She struck a stiff pose and her expression turned serious, as if that were a requirement for High Art. Emily smiled.

Eventually, Héloïse waved her inside for biscuits and milk. She looked so absolutely right in her maroon skirt and long apron stirring soup in an iron kettle hanging in the stone fireplace. Only a few simple objects surrounded her—crocks and ladle, oil lamp, basket, two rush-bottomed chairs. It was as sparse as Sophie's house. In the dim room, Emily contemplated shapes—from butter churn to broom to bellows. Simple geometric forms—ovals, half rounds, columns, trapezoids—that's all they were. Héloïse herself was an egg shape suspended over a bulging rectangle. She took out her sketch pad. Héloïse smiled and chatted gaily as though Emily could understand.

When she finished, she hugged Héloïse and walked through the rectangle of light past two leafy spheres and a green cone. Before her a pale sienna strip narrowed in the distance, lined by white rectangles. The sensation was eerie. Where there had been hayricks when she walked into Héloïse's cottage, now there were giant ochre blocks. Near them stood three connected trapezoids with defined planes, on four angled cylinders in Vandyke brown. It might be a horse. It didn't matter what it was. It was more interesting as shapes and planes. On the way home, shapes and planes overwhelmed her as the only reality. She breathed hard.
This
she could use to paint totems.

A summer thunderstorm kept her indoors the next day, so she
reworked her Alert Bay watercolors, simplifying to geometric shapes and exaggerating. For three rainy days she didn't stop painting in her room, transforming her native subjects. On the fourth, Gibb came to her door under a torn umbrella. She pulled him inside and laid out a display of new work and old.

“You're getting it,” he said.

“Getting what?” She always had to pull it out of him.

“The difference between objects as you see them in the world and their shapes transferred to flat surface.”

“And the handling of unblended pigment?”

“That too.” He looked at the one of Héloïse and almost smiled. “Gauguin painted those same Breton headdresses.”

“What about the native subject matter?”

“Entirely appropriate for you, with not a little aesthetic interest.”

“Not a little? How much is that?”

“Some Paris dealers show African sculpture. Picasso painted in African motif and Gauguin owes much to primitive art.”

“Do you think I can sell paintings of native motifs?”

“Maybe someday, but not until you paint them out of a deeper experience, with ideas out of your soul.”

“I thought I was. You even told me. Soul is energy.”

He wrinkled his lips. “That's not all it is. It's personal expression.” With one hand he gestured to Chief Wakias's Raven's beak. With the other, Héloïse's cottage. “Which one has it?”

“Both!”

He shook his head and left.

She fumed the rest of the afternoon, paced in her room, compared both paintings for soul, couldn't decide which one had it, and felt like kicking herself for not making Gibb explain. She couldn't paint in such confusion, so she wrote to Jessica.

July 12, 1911

I may be a simpering provincial here, but oh what I'm learning! These new, joyous ways of painting blow the top of my head off some days. Other days, my flop fears paralyze me. My teacher says I've got to paint ideas out of my soul. He says he doesn't see it in my work. But it isn't a see. It's a feel—the way the forest seeps into my innards, or wind
who-whoo's through pines, or totem eyes stare back. Oh, how I miss it. I have heaps to tell you when I get home. Thanks for prodding me to come.

Your old fusspot, Emily

In the morning, she got out of bed and lifted the curtain. The ground was puddled, but dry enough for her to work. What was she to do but to start again and show him? She trudged out of the village in galoshes.

The world crackled with after-a-rain brilliance. She set up her easel and stool, loaded her brush, one side with Naples yellow, the other with raw sienna, and quickly dashed off the rolling wheat field without even charcoaling it in first.

Breezes rippled the wheat like thousands of fluid paintbrushes upright and swaying, painting the air. That was an idea out of her soul. Brushes. When she'd gotten her first ones she'd marveled at their magic compared to colored pencils. A thin line trailed out if she held her brush so it barely touched the paper, thicker with more pressure. Dampened in green pigment, the brush could, with a flick of her wrist, suggest a leaf.

Now, in the distance, she let a flick of her wrist suggest a hayrick and peasants.

She remembered placing in her father's big hand a drawing of the family dog. He gave it a glance, said, “Hm,” and went back to reading his paper. But on her seventh birthday, under a card in Father's broad handwriting,
To Millie, who sees glory in dogs and birds and cow yards,
there they were, eight rectangular cakes of pigment and three slim yellow brushes.

In a gush of gratitude, she painted out the farmers and painted in a man dressed in pale raw sienna in the mid-ground. She put a shape in his hand. It could be a box. A paintbox even.

When Father planted the seed, he hadn't foreseen that he'd later feel compelled to kill it. She could hear the scorn in his voice years later when he said,
It's one thing for a child to paint pretty pictures. It's quite another for a grown woman to take such amusements seriously.
He was afraid it would make her unmarriageable. He didn't care about what she wanted. She changed his clothing to violet and Payne's gray, his face to lime green and yellow ochre. She layered color after color, building up a thick impasto, her hand flying, the colors coming from some inward place.

It was an experiment in painting without a preconceived plan, in moving elements around, in letting colors show her emotions. It was an experiment, and she ruined it. It wasn't soul. It was anger. She hadn't defined her feelings about the figure so it was unconvincing in shape and muddy in color. She dreaded some sharp comment about her foolishness from Gibb.

“It's going into the dustbin,” she told him the next day.

“You're willing to risk your best to learn something better. That's why you'll be a fine painter someday—woman painter.”

“Why can't you just say painter?”

A sound, not a word, came out of his mouth. His eyes looked like those of a small cornered animal. She didn't really want to hear what he'd say.

“Why don't you show me your work? Or other students' work?”

“They don't know what they're after. You do.”

“I think I'm getting stale. I've learned tremendous lessons from you, and I'm grateful, but maybe I've painted with you long enough.”

His eyebrow twisted into the same curve as his lips. He tapped a brush against his wrist and gazed at her work. “
D'accord.
A New Zealand woman, Frances Hodgkins, is teaching at Concarneau, a port south of here. I'll write to her today. Give me your home address for me to ship those paintings.”

The clarity that they were parting dawned on both of them at the same instant. She felt a cord unraveling between them. For once he looked directly at her, his eyes watery wounds.

“Remember when you get home, critics' insults are medals of honor. Stay away from art jargon, Emily, and learn from your silent Indian.”

She repeated it to herself, word for word.

“One more thing. Very important. See the Salon d'Automne at the Grand Palais. All your progress will become clear.” He thrust his head forward, his eyes intense. “Promise me.”

He reached out his hand as if to grasp her arm, to touch her to make her know the importance of what he was saying.

She held her breath and thought, Yes, touch me.

His hand, blue paint under his thumbnail, stayed suspended in midair.

“I promise.”

Emily ran her fingers through her hair to tame it before she knocked. A woman answered. She was about her age, maybe older, nearly as stout. She wore an orange blouse, dark blue skirt, and black beret with a bold brass buckle at the front. Emily introduced herself.

The woman flung wide the door. “I expected you yesterday. Come in. I'm Frances.”

Emily entered a small cluttered room and found clothes hanging on easels, dishes piled on sketchbooks, jars of brushes on windowsills, every inch of wall space filled with vivid color. Instantly she felt at home.

“It took a day for me to find a room to rent. This town's packed with visitors.”

“Always is in August.” Frances tossed her hat onto the bed, flumped into a sagging wicker armchair, and unlaced her shoes. “Whew! I just came in. Squeezed every drop of the day at both ends behind an easel. My feet are throbbing, but what glorious light.”

“Harry Gibb said you might have space for another student.”

Frances crossed her ankle over her knee to rub her arch. “He ought to have known. My summer classes are finished. I'm not taking students now. If you teach all the time, you can't paint.”

Emily groaned.

“So, in that portfolio you have something to show for yourself?”

Emily pulled out everything, the recent St. Efflam scenes on top.

“I like the vigor and your loose suggestion of detail around the cottage.” She switched to rub the other foot. “You use color well to give shape to that church.”

Then she
was
getting it. And this woman with the ponderous cheeks was capable of saying something that wasn't brusque.

Frances uncovered Chief Wakias's Raven beak. “Gracious!” She stopped massaging her foot and pulled the string to light the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. She spread out more redone paintings of poles, and scrutinized each one. “Bizarre.”

“That may be, but they're carved with great sincerity.”

“Don't apologize. Apologies are for milksops. I love these. Wait a minute.” She moved some dishes and sketchbooks aside, dug through a stack of her own watercolors, and pulled out several of natives sitting on the ground wrapped in plaid blankets and wearing heavy beaded necklaces. “They're Maoris.”

Green eyelids. Blue-white lips. “Surprising color handling, and interesting faces,” Emily said. But no native context. Nothing to suggest their culture. Done from the outside.

“I did them on my last trip home. My father hates them. He runs an art school in Dunedin.” The confession sparked a scampish smile.

“Hates the subject or the style?”

“Everything about them. It isn't just him. The more different I become, the more my country rejects me.”

That sent a pall through her. What about her own country?

Frances studied the totems again. “You know, it's probably condescending of us, this attraction to the primitive. Do you think it's substituting for something in us?”

“It's not a substitute for me. And I don't feel it to be condescending,” Emily said.

Frances gave her a sidelong look. “Never mind. What is it that you want in these paintings?”

“I thought I wanted to make an accurate record of the totem poles in their village or forest settings, before they're destroyed. They deserve a record.”