Mnemonic (29 page)

The book set out to teach me basic painterly skills, beginning with materials, preparing the support, taking an image from sketch to painting, demonstrating with arrows and crosshatching how to keep a composition dynamic, mixing colours on a handy plate or piece of glass. His first intention (I believe this) was to offer me quick lessons in the skills I'd need to paint. But it quickly filled with drawings of me — my face, my body (in poses I'd never have agreed to), my clothing peeled away like bark. I turn its pages now, a woman in her fifties, and understand something about obsession. Maybe even love.

Out the window of my study, an arbutus tree stands in a bed of periwinkle. Warblers dart among its blossoms in spring, eager for the tiny insects that are drawn to their honeyed scent; band-tailed pigeons visit in late summer for its berries. It's like a patient beautiful woman, arms open to the sky. And looking at the tree, I'm reminded of how age too can be peeled away like bark to show the smooth new layer, waiting to receive its first experience of sun and rain, the light feet of birds, a young snake curled at the base, listening with its tongue.

In Venice, we looked at hundreds of paintings over two weeks. I noticed colour like never before. Was it November's grey skies and the dark water of the canals that made things so vivid by contrast? The ancient buildings with their peeling paint more beautiful for the wear? No matter. I would enter a church or a
scuola
and the reds would ravish my eyes. The dense warmth of the yellows heated the chilly interiors like embers. And skin glowed like the flesh of the young, as though lit from an inner source.

I loved the carmines (from cochineal insects), the Venetian red (derived from red iron oxides), ultramarines, azurites, Egyptian blues, purples from indigo and madder, malachite and verdigris (from acetate of copper) greens, lemony orpiment and Naples yellows, burnt Siennas and umbers, the heavy white of lead and the lighter chalks and gypsums, and the carbon blacks (from burned bones, soot from lamps, charred remains of vines). There was a shop we passed often in the Dorsoduro where powdered pigments filled a tray in the window, the colours crying out to be purchased and mixed.

What would they have been mixed with? Oil, of course: linseed, walnut, or poppy. With solvents to dilute them for translucent glazing. Different colours dry at different rates, so that would be considered when mixing — turpentine, or a little more oil, perhaps, added to the Alizarin crimson and some of the yellows which dry very slowly. These ingredients would be added much more sparingly to the ochres and Venetian crimson (depending on the schema of the work itself) because they dried faster. An artist in the heat of creation, wanting layer after layer of transparent colour to intensify hue and create the optical effect of warmth and depth, would want the layers of paint to dry quickly enough to allow the momentum of the work to be sustained (unless there was something to be gained by working
alla prima
).

In the past few years, inventories have emerged from the dusty depths of the state archives in Venice which reveal that sixteenth-century painters had convenient access, through sellers of artists' pigments, to the raw materials used by glassmakers and dyers — finely ground particles of coloured glass.
⁴
The use of blue smalt, or finely ground blue cobalt glass, was already known about in some fresco work; but further analysis, using scanning electron microscopy and energy-dispersive spectrometry, of the work of Lorenzo Lotto and Tintoretto revealed presence of other colours of glass, the silicas and irons allowing for an expansion of colour choice. The glass was used with pigment in very thin glazes that resulted in transparency, vibrancy of colour, and luminosity, qualities associated with the work of these artists. The glass also acted as a drying agent, fundamental in facilitating the application of many layers.

Those grey days in Venice, I made my way along quiet back streets among carnival masks and shops resplendent with pastries as beautiful as sculpture to Madonna dell'Orto, Tintoretto's own church in the Cannaregio where his canvasses filled the space.
The Presentation of Mary at the Temple, the Sacrifice of the Golden Calf
— such colour and drama! To Sant'Alvise where the Tiepolos brought tears to my eyes — Christ laden with his cross on the road to Calvary, his flagellation, the crown of thorns. And Tiepolo again as we sat in the Scuola Grande dei Carmini to listen to
La Traviata
on a dark night, light casting its spell on the flesh of the heavy-eyed Mary on panels, the plump Violetta singing on the stage.

Near Arbutus Point

The list embarrasses me, but I remember one older man, an amiable satyr, who took me to a hidden beach in moonlight and laid me down on his coat, spread over cool sand. What he did with his tongue was miraculous. No boy I'd dated ever suggested such pleasures were possible. They brought out their wallets, the leather imprinted with the ring of a condom, those badges of honour — and saw no reason why anyone needed to go farther than the back seat of a car, parked at Beaver Lake or the end of my parents' road. Not to remote beaches in moonlight where arbutus trees rustled in wind and a bald man made me cry out in surprise.

But I will tell you that if you wish to keep your complexion for a long time, you must make a practice of washing in water — spring or well or river: warning you that if you adopt any artificial preparation your countenance soon becomes withered, and your teeth black; and in the end ladies grow old before the course of time . . . And this will have to be enough discussion of the matter.

— Cennini,
The Craftsman's Handbook

More than thirty years ago, I removed my clothes for an artist, each layer — the baggy sweater, jeans, cotton underpants, lace bra — flung to the ground in careless abandon of a self I hoped I could transcend, on canvas if not in fact. What he wanted from me wasn't physical exactly. It was what men often hope to find in a woman's presence that makes itself known in her body. Before that, and afterwards, there were others who found this in me though I was puzzled by their conviction that I had something they needed. Occasionally I recognized it in poems written for other women, for instance the beautiful “On Raglan Road” by Patrick Kavanagh.
⁵

I gave her gifts of the mind I gave her the secret sign that's known

To the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone

And word and tint. I did not stint for I gave her poems to say.

With her own name there and her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May . . .

— and also in poems written for me, most of them by the poet who became my husband. Time provides such clarity and from this great distance I wish I'd been more easy with the role in which I'd been cast. It troubled me then because I thought I was at fault, that I wasn't worthy of the kind of relationships my friends were entering into. Now I can honestly say it was a privilege to (however briefly) occupy the imagination of a man who caressed my skin with brushes of hogs hair and sable, and who filled a small book with my image.

I am memorized on canvas, on paper, a Madonna without the beautiful long eyes or that wise serenity. And I look down from the wall of our living room, a poster girl in a robe of Alizarin crimson. A poster girl whose face was underpainted in terre verte (an unctuous earth pigment, taking its green from hydrated oxide of iron), and then left. Surely this was an exercise in
verdaccio
and my painter intended to use the grey-green to establish the values for painting my flesh with successive layers of glaze? Unfinished, or abandoned, or given up to dull green earth. It took time, but I came to love this version of my younger self, uncharacteristically elegant, her skin echoing the new bark of the arbutus framed by the large window. And there's another portrait, a dreamy girl with flowers in her hair; she is wearing a blue wool vest I sewed from fabric bought at Capitol Iron in Victoria. She hangs high in the stairwell and gazes down as I descend the stairs each morning, dishevelled and eager for my coffee. I'm not sure if she sees me or sees through me. And if the obverse is also true.

There are arbutus trees at Francis Point, a grove of them, leaning out to sea, wanting to partake of the cool air off the water on summer days. Mount one and stretch your body along its length. Has there ever been a tree more seductive to the touch? Has there ever been a trunk, peeled of its bark and new, more like the smooth torso of a beloved? Without mark or blemish, asking us to run our hands along its taut muscularity? The underwood is chartreuse, radiating light.

How many times do we shed our outer layers in a life? How many times expose our tender new skin to the world, soft as the soles of a child who has never touched the earth? Looking out my window, I see the bark curling from the arbutus on the south side of my house. Like paint peeling from an old surface, we hardly notice it but are drawn to what's revealed underneath. Steaming the bark with the pale bulbs of camas would turn them pink as young flesh, beauty for the eye and the palate.

Postscript

Even the red-breasted nuthatches that visit my feeders have a black line elongating their eyes to make them as elegant as Veneziano's Mary . . .

“May I help you?” asked the nice woman at the cosmetics counter in Shopper's Drug Mart in Sechelt. “I'm not sure,” was my reply. I explained about the eyes of the Byzantine Madonnas and without even raising her own well-shaped eyebrow she sat me on a stool, brought out a pot of deep brown powdered eye shadow and a thin brush, and tilted my face up with one hand on my chin. Deftly she brushed a thin line along my eyelids, top and bottom, and gave me a hand mirror to look in. Well! I certainly don't have the long almond eyes of those ikonic women, nor do I share their beautiful serenity; but I was pleased to see a quality of which Cennini might have approved.
Then take a little black in another little dish, and with the same brush mark out the outline of the eyes
. . . I bought a pot of the shadow and a brush and have been trying ever since, without success, to replicate the effect. Which goes to show that some have the sure hand of an artist, and some don't.