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Title
Content

Painting from Life

Margaret Wilmot

A Hot January

First publication: April 2006

http://badosa.com/p158

1

Your studios

You left the crying baby, small apartment,

walked down the hill to the train across the Bay;

then, alert to angles, vistas, movements of

a city on the water, cut across

to the old Monkey-block, gone now, even

the name, and that studio gone. No war,

no slum — places like memories just get blotted out.

Then Walnut Street complete with walnut-tree,

pot-belly stove — demolished too — and the studio

on La Vereda, which translated as “path,”

or — in another idiom — “the sidewalk.”

All the New York spaces, huge and freezing

Fourteenth Street — and when you returned later on

to pay back rent (yes, then you were punctilious),

the landlord brothers, who wore long shawls and beards,

reached down sweet wine and poured you all a toast.

There was that tiny place you called the “bedbug-farm,”

the one on 23rd St. where you painted moons,

the loft with plants the borough then tore down...

So many studios — turned homes, till the word “home”

itself was lost beneath strata of paint

and longing, the wedge and scrape of palette-knives,

beneath the colours which wooed and pleaded,

terre verte, alizarin, cadmium orange...

2

1940s

Eyelids flicker. Pain is bred in the bone.

We want to love — all we want is to love.

You want to cry, look down. Renée doesn’t

understand, is afraid to understand,

she who grew up in a fairy-tale where

her folks loved each other and their little

princess and they all lived happily in

a little shingle house up from the Bay.

She doesn’t hear, blindly insists, I don’t know

what’s wrong with you. Forget him. Anger isn’t Nice.

And the innocuous word gathers weight —

moral overtone. Eyelids flicker, flicker.

Both of you refusing to see — And pain

bred in the bone, mother’s milk... You slam off,

seize charcoal and sketch a forest of black

curves, strokes, jabs, a woman — beginning to see,

yes, of course — who becomes a pot-belly stove.

Painting now... if the strawman tilts just so —

3

1920s

You are five years old, having breakfast with Dad.

You like getting up early, the two of you,

having breakfast together before he leaves.

Today is special, April Fools, and you’ve put

salt in the sugar-bowl... Your eyes sparkle

as he sprinkles salt across his Corn Flakes,

stirs two spoonfuls in his coffee. His rage

knows no bounds; he spits, and screams at you, and screams.

Eyelids flicker. By seventeen it is you

who are screaming, hurling chairs through windows.

He wants you to play football, work in his shop,

not hang around with those fairies — he rattles

his paper when your sister’s practising.

Who needs Chopin? It’s dance music they want.

4

In the museum

The sun’s a white eye — it cuts through night,

hacks like tin. This is war, the war you longed to fight.

So clear the huge wrong, so clean the right —

you were ardent with dreams of fighting black with white.

A horse shrieks, bull stares; torch casts tin light;

blades break. This is the war you wanted to go fight.

The women lunging with rage and pain...

You stare. This is the war you longed to fight in Spain.

You thought you could leave your own civil war,

own rage and pain — not take it to Spain. Eyes stare.

5

1960s

You light another cigarette, stand back,

survey the nude on the easel, full frontal,

twisting forward, as if on a pink chair...

something about the articulation

in the legs... But you glance at your watch, late

for class, again. You grab a clean turtle-neck,

sweep a handful of change off the bureau-top,

dash food into the cat-bowl, and lock up,

not forgetting (security New York-style)

to leave the radio on and call back,

“It’ll be at least ten.” But it’s later,

much later, before you roll in happy-drunk

from a party at your landlord’s. You wadge up

an old envelope for the cat to chase

across the studio floor. Ah — those legs,

it’s that shadow-pink... You reach for a brush.

When the museum closes down its school,

a vital scaffolding drops away. You

slowly free-fall down, down into that nightmare

pain bred in the bone and the whole world hurting,

become your Dad; it threatens, talks money, money.

Your colours rage brazen, brushes jab.

Why aren’t things better organised? Organised

for artists? You venture out chiefly for scotch

and Saltines, kick out the dealer invited

to see your work, pour another glass, stare at

the canvas, where born of the glance of light

on wave... Yes, this was your use of memory,

not for liberation but civil war.

Painting dreams in cobalt, viridian,

ochre, terre verte, painting love and desire,

and too, on giant bicycles, their huge

thighs pumping over a next hill, women

shrieking or singing or swearing, women

bearing your pain away over a hill...

While you drank and raged, why does he want rent?

He’s a millionaire. On the floor above

your landlord built a handball-court. Thud. Thud.

6

Hospital

Hospital’s safe. So wondrously safe. Eyes

close as you sink back into a velvet

darkness. In my beginning is my end.

Unless eyes clap their hands and sing, unless ears —

You swim up through your tubes, hearing a step

by the bed, open your eyes on legs, long legs,

how pretty this young nurse stepping off

the too-white canvas... You sink back into

the comfortable black underworld where no

bird sings money, money and there’s nothing

for a poor artist to pay... And the care,

it’s warmer than scotch, like having sympathy

on tap. You lap it up, push far away

the unpleasantly nagging awareness

that this is the underworld: it is your task

to come out the other side. You don’t like

tasks, they smack of your Dad. You call the nurse,

inquire fretfully about a sleeping-pill.

7

San Francisco

It’s hot, and your studio on a top floor

off Market Street is hotter. A Balcony

Woman gazes out over a cool sea,

but no breeze fans the Calligraphic City

on the opposite wall. It takes an act

of God to get you out, but then you can’t

stop looking. “Green,” you murmur in the park,

“I think I became an artist to paint green.”

Sun riffles the gingko leaves. “What about

that trip down the coast? You up to it yet?”

I wonder. “Mother’s eager to come too,

and there’s an open invitation to lunch.”

The wide white beach has hardly changed —

your eyes drink in bent cypresses, kelp festoons,

the shining sweep where dunlins peck between

the suck and fling of breakers. “Remember when

the soles of your feet got sunburned?” Mother smiles.

You want to find the rocks south of the point

where you’d set your easel up among tide-pools

alive with white crabs, starfish, anemones.

“This was the sea I was always painting,”

you tell friends over lunch, eyes drinking the view,

forgetting Long Island, and the rocks off Maine —

or maybe there only is a first sea.

8

1998-1999

You are sitting in the patio, this

brick patio you laid forty years ago;

sometimes you visit now, when you can get

a lift across the Bay. You love the light

on La Vereda, falling through pepper-trees —

it makes a kind of shadow-beaded curtain,

dancing, not still... You enjoy a sandwich...

Today you and Renée discussed at length

whether to have egg salad with scallions,

or avocado and bacon on rye,

and then a long time later she came out

with lettuce, cheese and tomato on whole wheat,

sliced diagonally on a blue plate.

She always did make food look beautiful.

You smiled. “Tastes delicious!” Her black cat appeared,

and you began remembering aloud

Black Venus in New York, how she fetched,

you’d throw a paper-wad, she’d bring it back —

Renée’s face is so young when she’s laughing...

All we want is to love. When she brought that

cappuccino milkshake to the hospital,

you agreed to put the past behind you.

You admire the peonies together,

talk of her class in botanical drawing.

Even your parents are fading... They were

children, benighted children, afraid... You

go back to The Lemons, and the angle

of light has changed, the shadow’s easier now,

won’t need that alizarin you don’t have.

You reach out for Cadmium Yellow Light.