Starshipsofa stories vol.., p.9
StarShipSofa Stories: Volume 3, page 9
The message light was on when I got back to the hotel; both Rhonda Speck and Segura had arrived. It wasn’t quite ten, but Harry and I agreed it was too late to return their calls, and retired.
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I set up the pose and lighting before we went under, explaining to Rhonda exactly what we were after. Segura was silent, watching. I took longer than necessary, messing with the blinds and the rheostats I’d put on the two light sources. I wanted Segura to get used to Rhonda’s nudity. He was obviously straight as a plank, and we didn’t want the painting to reveal any sexual curiosity or desire. Rhonda was only slightly more sexy than a mackerel, but you could never tell.
For the same reason, I didn’t want to start the actual painting the first day. First we’d do a series of charcoal roughs. I explained to Segura about negative spaces and how important it was to establish balance between the light and dark areas. That was something I’d already worked out, of course. I just wanted him to stare at Rhonda long enough to become bored with the idea.
It didn’t quite work out that way.
We didn’t need a doctor’s certification in George Town, so the setting up took a little less time. Artist and client lockstepped into the office where Rhonda waited, studying the pages of notes stacked neatly on her desk.
There were two piano stools with identical newsprint pads and boxes of charcoal sticks. The idea was to sketch her from eight or ten slightly different angles, Segura moving around her in a small arc while I worked just behind him, looking over his shoulder. Theoretically, I could be anywhere, even in another room, since I was seeing her through his eyes. But it seems to work better this way, especially with a model.
The sketches had a lot of energy – so much energy that Segura actually tore through the paper a few times, blocking out the darkness around the seated figure. I actually got excited myself, and not just by feedback from Segura. The”negative-space” exercise is just that, an art-school formalism, but Segura didn’t know that, and the result came close to being actual art.
I showed him that after we came out of the buffer. The sketches were good strong abstractions. You could turn them upside-down or sideways, retaining symmetry while obliterating text, and they still worked well.
I had a nascent artist on my hands. Segura had real native talent. The combination could have produced a painting of some value, one that I wouldn’t have been able to do by myself. If things had worked out.
Harry and I took the boat out after lunch – or rather, Harry took the boat out with me as ballast, baking inertly under a heavy coat of total sunblock. (Allison and I are almost equally pale, and that’s not all we have in common; I’m also nearly as well-muscled. We met at the weight machines in a Broadway gym.) He sang songs in Athabaskan, probably about blizzards and clubbing seals. I watched billowing clouds form abstract patterns in the impossible cobalt sky. The soothing sounds of the boat lulled me to sleep – the keel slipping through warm water, the lines creaking, the ruffle of the sails.
Harry woke me to help bring her back in. He’d tacked out quite a few miles, the highrises and cruise ships below the horizon, and had expected a quick run back on a following wind. Of course the wind shifted seaward, and we had to fight it back to the island, dark clouds gathering. One person can handle the 32-foot sloop, but it’s a lot easier with two, especially tacking into a strong wind. There was a cool mist of rain that became intermittantly heavy. A couple of miles from shore we started to see lightning, so we struck sail and revved up the little motor and drove straight in, prudence conquering seamanship.
We dried off at the marina bar and drank hot chocolate laced with rum, watching a squall line roll across land and water, feeling lucky to be inside.
Sometimes I have difficulty talking with Harry. Circumstances of birth and upbringing left me”cultured” but not particularly well educated; Harry is quite the opposite. How can a person earn four degrees and still be unable to learn how to hold a wineglass? But he can talk knowledgeably about anything from astrophysics to Zoroastrianism. He doesn’t draw or paint, but he knows art history and criticism, so we usually wind up talking about my work rather than his, cultural linguistics and anthropology – though in a weak moment I did agree to go up to the Arctic with him one summer. Paint mud landscapes while he chats with the natives, compiling examples for a cassette that will go with his book.
Anyhow, I had earlier described to him the morning’s surprising successes. He’d given it some thought.
“I don’t want to see them yet,” he said.”They’ll be more interesting in the context established by the final painting.”
“You just don’t want to say anything that might rain on my parade.” He shrugged and laughed.”We know each other too well, Harry. You know you’d have to be honest, and you’re afraid honesty might not be the best policy now.”
“Further deponent sayeth not.” He smiled and turned his attention back to the storm.”Wet and wild. Photography tomorrow?”
“Yeah. And then drawing drawing drawing.”
“The part you like best.”
“Oh yes.” Actually, I halfway do like it, the way an athlete can enjoy warming up, in expectation of the actual event.
I could have done the photography and drawing without Segura, but I wanted him involved, so that he would have a lot of time and concentration invested before we started painting. It affects your attitude toward both subject and working surface.
The next morning I set up the cameras before we went into the skinsuits. The main one was a fairly complex and delicate piece of equipment, an antique 8 X 10 view camera that took hairline-accurate black and white negatives. I could have accomplished the same thing with a modern large-format camera, but I liked the smooth working of the gears, the smell of the oak and leather, the sense of contact with an earlier, less hurried, age. The paradox of combining the technology of that age with ours.
The other camera was a medium-format Polaroid. Buffered and suited, I led Segura through the arcane art and science of tweaking lights, model, f-stop, and exposure to produce a subtle spectrum of prints: a sequence of 98 slightly different, and profoundly different, pictures of one woman. We studied the pictures and her and finally decided on the right combination. I set up the antique 8 X 10 and reproduced the lighting. We focussed it with his somewhat younger eyes and took three slightly different exposures.
Then we took the film into the darkroom that M&M had improvised in the firm’s executive washroom. We developed each sheet in Rodinal, fixed and washed them and hung them weighted up to dry.
We left the darkroom and spent a few minutes smoking, studying Rhonda as she studied her law. I told her she was free for three days; show up Thursday morning. She nodded curtly and left, resentful.
Her annoyance was understandable. She’d been sitting there naked for all that time we were playing in the darkroom. I should have dismissed her when we finished shooting.
We lit up another cigarette and I realized that it wasn’t me who had kept her waiting. It was Segura. I’d started to tell her to go and then he manufactured a little crisis that led straight to the darkroom. From then on I hadn’t thought of the woman except as a reversed ghost appearing in the developer tray.
Under the circumstances, it wasn’t a bad thing to have her hostile toward us, if we could capture the hostility on paper. But it goes against my grain to mistreat an employee, even a temporary one.
We examined each of the negatives with lightbox and loupe, then took the best one back into the darkroom for printing. Plain contact prints on finest-grain paper. The third one was perfect: rich and stark, almost scary in its knife-edge sharpness. You could see one bleached hair standing out from her left nipple.
That was enough work for the day; in fact, we’d gone slightly over the six-hour limit, and both of us were starting to get headaches and cramps. Another half-hour and it would be double vision and tremors. More than that – though I’d never experienced it – you wind up mentally confused, the two minds still linked electrically but no longer cooperating. Some poor guinea pigs took it as far as convulsions or catatonia, back when the buffer drug was first being developed.
M&M eased us out of it and helped us down to a taxi. It was only five blocks to the hotel, but neither of us was feeling particularly athletic. (For some reason the buffer hangover hits people like me, in very good shape, particularly hard. Segura was somewhat flabby and overweight, but he had less trouble getting out of the car.)
Harry wasn’t in the room, which suited me fine. I pulled the blackout blinds and collapsed, desperately hungry but too tired to do anything about it but dream of food.
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Allison had set up the paper, one large sheet of hand-made hot-pressed 400-pound rag, soaking it overnight and then taping it down with plenty of time to dry completely. That sheet of paper, the one Segura would be drawing on, cost more than some gallery paintings. The sheet I’d be working on was just paper, with a similar tooth. My drawing would be a random scribble, though it would look fine while I was working on it.
We had set up two drawing tables with their boards at identical angles, mine a little higher since I have a larger frame. An opaque projector mounted above Segura shot a duplicate of yesterday’s photo onto the expensive paper. Our job for the next three days was to execute a meticulously accurate but ghost-light tracing of the picture, which would be gently erased after the painting was done.
Some so-called photorealists bypass this step with a combination of photography and xerography – make a high-contrast print and then impress a light Xerox of it onto watercolour paper. That makes their job a high-salaried kind of paint-by-numbers. Doing the actual under-drawing puts you well”into” the painting before the first brush is wet.
We sat down and went to work, starting with the uniformly bound law books on the shelves behind Rhonda. It was an unchallenging, repetitive subject to occupy us while we got used to doing this kind of labour together.
For a few minutes we worked on a scrap piece of the same kind of paper that was in front of me, until I was absolutely confident of his eye and hand. Then we started on the real thing.
After five gruelling hours we had completed about a third of the background, an area half the size of a newspaper page. I was well pleased with that progress; working by myself I would have done little more.
Segura was not so happy. In the taxi, he cradled his right hand and stared at it, the wrist quivering, the thumb frankly twitching.”How can I possibly keep this up?” he said.”I won’t even be able to pick up a pencil tomorrow.”
I held out my own hand and wrist, steady, muscular.”But I will. That’s all that counts.”
“It could permanently damage my hand.”
“Never happened.” Of course, I’d never worked with anyone for three weeks.”Go to that masseur, the man whose card I gave you. He’ll make your hand good as new. Do you still have the card?”
“Oh, yeah.” He shifted uncomfortably.”I don’t mean to be personal, or offensive... but is this man gay? I would have trouble with that.”
“I wouldn’t know. We don’t have little badges or a secret handshake.” He didn’t laugh, but he looked less grim.”My relationship with him is professional; I wouldn’t know whether he was gay or not.” Actually, since our professional relationship included orgasm, if he wasn’t gay, he was quite a method actor. But I assumed he would divine Segura’s orientation as quickly as I had. A masseur, so to speak, ought to have a feel for his clients.
The next day went a lot better; like myself, Segura was heartened by the sight of the previous day’s careful work outline. We worked faster and with equal care, finishing all of the drawing except for the woman and the things on the desk in front of her.
It was on the third day that I had the first inkling of trouble. Working on the image of Rhonda, Segura wanted to bear down too hard. That could be disastrous; if the pencil point actually broke the fibres of paper along a line, it could never be completely erased. You can’t have”outlines” in this kind of painting; just sharply defined masses perfectly joining other sharply defined masses. A pencil line might as well be an inkblot.
If I had correctly interpreted the energy behind that pencil point, I might have stopped the project right then. Give Segura his money back, put the model, Allison, and M&M back on the plane to New York and set sail for Jamaica. I say”might.” I’m as curious about human nature as the next person, maybe more curious because of the peculiar insights facilitating gives me. If I had known Segura then as well as I came to know him, I might have gone ahead with it anyhow. Just to see the painting.
At the time, though, I put it down to simple muscular fatigue. Segura was not in good physical shape. His normal work day comprised six hours in conference and six hours talking on the phone or dictating correspondence. He took a perverse pride in not even being able to keyboard. He never lifted anything heavier than a cigarette.
People who think art isn’t physically demanding ought to try to sit in one position for six hours, brush or pencil in hand, staring at something or someone and trying to transfer its essence to a piece of paper or canvas. Even an athletic person leaves that arena with aches and twinges. A couch potato like Segura can’t even walk away without help.
He never complained, though, other than expressing concern that his fatigue might interfere with the project. I reassured him almost every day. In fact, I had once completed a successful piece with a hemiplegic so frail he couldn’t sign his name the same way twice. We taught ourselves how to hold the brush in our teeth.
It was a breathtaking moment when we turned off the overhead projector for the last time. The finished drawing floated on the paper, an exquisite ghost of what the painting would become. Through Segura’s eyes I stared at it hungrily for fifteen or twenty minutes, mapping out strategies of frisket and mask, in my mind’s eye seeing the paper glow through layer after careful layer of glaze. It would be perfect.
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Rhonda wasn’t in a great mood, coming back to sit after three days on her own, but even she seemed to share our excitement when she saw the underdrawing. It made the project real.
The first step was to paint a careful frisket over her figure, as well as the chair, lamp, and table with its clutter. That took an hour, since the figure was more than a foot high on the paper. I also masked out reflections on a vase and the glass front of a bookcase.
I realized it would be good to start the curtains with a thin wash of Payne’s Gray, which is not a colour I normally keep on my palette, so I gave Rhonda a five-minute break while I rummaged for it. She put on a robe and walked over to the painting and gasped. We heard her across the room.
I looked over and saw what had distressed her. The beautifully detailed picture of her body had been blotted out with gray frisket, and it did look weird. She was a non-being, a featureless negative space hovering in the middle of an almost photographic depiction of a room. All three of us laughed at her reaction. I started to explain, but she knew about frisketing; it had just taken her by surprise.
Even the best facilitators have moments of confusion, when their client’s emotional reaction to a situation is totally at odds with their own. This was one of those times: my reaction to Rhonda’s startled response was a kind of ironic empathy, but Segura’s reaction was malicious glee.
I could see that he disliked Rhonda at a very deep level. What I didn’t see (although Allison had known from the first day) was that it wasn’t just Rhonda. It was women in general.
I’ve always liked women, even though I’ve known since thirteen or fourteen that I would never desire them. It’s pernicious to generalize, but I think that my friendships with women have usually been deeper and more honest than they would have been if I were straight. A straight man can simply like a woman and desire her friendship, but there’s always a molecule or two of testosterone buzzing between them, if they are both of an age and social situation where sex might be a possibility, however remote. I have to handle that complication with some men whom I know or suspect are gay, even when I feel no particular attraction toward them.
The drawing had gone approximately from upper left to lower right, then back to the middle for the figure, but the painting would have to proceed in a less straightforward way. You work all over the painting at once: a layer of rose madder on the spines of one set of books, and on the shady side of the vase, and on two of the flowers. You need a complete mental picture of the finished painting so you can predict the sequence of glazes, sometimes covering up areas with frisket or, when there were straight lines, with drafting tape. The paper was dry, though, so it was usually just a matter of careful brush work. Pathologically careful: you can’t erase paint.
Of course Rhonda had to sit even though for the first week her image would be hidden behind frisket. Her skin tones affected the colours of everything else. Her emotional presence affected the background. And Segura’s feeling toward her”coloured” the painting literally.
The work went very smoothly. It was a good thing Segura had suggested the trial painting; we’d been able to talk over the necessity for occasional boldness and spontaneity, to keep the painting from becoming an exercise in careful draftsmanship. Especially with this dark, sinister background, we often had to work glazes wet-into-wet. Making details soft and diffuse at the periphery of a painting can render it more realistic rather than less. Our own eyes see the world with precision only in a surprisingly small area around the thing that has our attention. The rest is blur, more or less ignored. (The part of the mind that is not ignoring the background is the animal part that waits for a sudden movement or noise; a painting can derive tension from that.)
