As the strange easel obviously carried the work which Chani had interrupted with her arrival, the lights were all on and the table betrayed all of the hallmarks of current activity, she immediately headed across the room for it. The actual painting was turned to the light coming through the French doors and as she caught a glimpse of it, and before she was fully in front of it, she let out a gasp of appreciation. Taking off towards her, through early morning, winter mists, the sun barely above the horizon, were two swans; their enormous wings beating the air in wide sweeps, their feet raising showers of water droplets as they ran over the surface of a mirror-like lake trying to build up speed. For all of the world it did not appear to her as a photograph would, painted though it might be with an obsessive attention to detail; an image captured in a fleeting fraction of second, frozen at a particular instant in time but rather she had the sense that were she to blink, the swans would be upon her, so great was the sense of movement, of flight. She could almost hear the slow, sonorous throbbing, 'thrum', 'thrum', 'thrum', of the wingbeats.
"Fucking hell!" She exclaimed. "Pardon my French but that is spectacular, I'd swear that they're alive!"
"Glad that you like it," he said smiling as he moved to a place beside her. "Another day or two, maybe three, should see it finished. I have a particular fascination with the way mute swans take off, walking, running across the water like Jesus in a sprint across the Sea of Galilee. They are so heavy and their wing loading is so high that they cannot fly from a standing position like most other birds can; the air first has to pass across the wings at speed to generate enough lift just to get them airborne, they need a runway just like an aeroplane, although once they are up in the air, they are majestic flyers with only seemingly effortless, relatively shallow wingbeats necessary to power them through the air."
She moved towards the easel, keen for a closer inspection, but as she moved nearer to the image before her, she found that what she had surmised was obsessive detail was, in fact, nothing of the sort. She recollected vague memories of pictures that he had painted during their time together. She remembered marveling at how few bristles his brushes had, how thin they were, this was clearly a different sort of painting; still in the vein of the hyper-realists but one in which the suggestion of detail was more important then the actual detail itself. She briefly glanced at the tubes of paint on the table and the brushes, upended in twp large, earthenware jars; everything was somehow much larger than she remembered it, even the painting itself.
"Don't you do those portraits, as you used to call them, anymore?" She asked. "The ones where it was just the bird and a perch with acres of white paper surrounding it."
"Yes, indeed," he replied. "However, once I started to sell a few of them for a reasonable price and wanting to perhaps have any real prospect of making a living from painting, I realized that I would have to expand my repertoire. The Arabs, for instance, want desert scenes to accompany their sakers and gyrs, others wanted landscapes in which the bird was only a part of the whole, not the whole itself; whether one wants to or not, compromises always need to be made if one is to make money, even a modest living. You can't just rely on what pleases you, the painter, either in the finished product or in the actual process of painting itself. I still draw the line at painting racing pigeons however!"
She smiled both in recognition of his last statement but also because she was surprised that she could still remember who had first suggested it over dinner one evening and the fit of pique that it had engendered; she wondered whether he was still so precious about his painting, still so particular. It did not seem so to her from hearing him speak today but nonetheless she still wondered. He had moved from her side and, opening a drawer in a plan chest, began to empty the contents onto the Formica laminated work surface above the cupboards and drawers. As he laid out the clear plastic, A1 envelopes, she distractedly picked up one the sketch books lying on the table with the paints and brushes and started to flick through the pages. She was amazed at how, with a few brief lines with pen or pencil, he seemed to be able to capture the essence of a bird, whether it was flying, sitting on a perch or merely preening. The pages were filled with, often overlapping, sketches as though paper were in short supply and every square inch had to be filled. Each page was signed 'Leo A' and the identity of the bird in his spidery script and the date on which the sketch or sketches had been made. She was staggered to note that from the first to the last page only eight days had elapsed, although there must have been fifty of so leaves covered on both sides. She found it difficult to reconcile this man with the one that she had known. How he would fret and worry over a sketch, a working drawing as he had called them; these seemingly disposable sketches in her hands were but doodlings. She wondered whether he could possibly use them in any way; they seemed like the artistic equivalent of idle chit-chat about the weather. And then, she turned a page and there it was; a small sketch, no more than three or four inches wide, of a swan running down his watery runway, his own personal path into the sky. Despite the paucity of line, any detail, and drawn in pen and ink, she could clearly see the genesis of the painting before her; this painting of the swans which she now so admired.
She was taken aback by her previous assessment of the man; a man doomed to follow a fruitless and pointless path; a man dreaming after impossible dreams; a man who was not grounded in reality except in the kitchen, where he was so eager to learn how to mix ghee, garlic and salt to the right consistency; a man who firmly believed in childish fairy tales and happy endings. Perhaps he had changed with age and she had not been so wrong all those years ago. His voice interrupted her reverie.
"There are a very few canvases stored in the cupboards and a few on paper, but the canvases are mostly inept or just rubbish that I cannot bear to throw away for purely sentimental reasons and are mostly to be found in the cellar. This here is pretty much all that is adequate but remains unsold. Come take a look-see," he said.
She walked over to him and looked, a brief glance at each, over the works paraded before her. This was the style that she remembered; the care and attention to the details of every feather; how he picked up the highlights in the feather shafts, the talons and the gleam in each bird's eye; how he painted, with thin washes, the reflections in a lake for his portraits of water fowl. Each plastic folder had a small card, an index card, labeled with the bird's name and some relevant details about where it had been sketched, where the painting had come from, or some quirk of the bird that he had noted; most were dated within the last five years, although some were older and somehow less accomplished.
As she took in the paintings spread out in front of her, she was struck by a thought, a recollection, an image in her mind, long buried but nonetheless now insistent; the first time she had ever actually sat for any period of time with the sole intent of watching him paint. She could see him quite clearly in the lens of her mind, the camera obscura of her memory; the long black hair controlled into a pony-tail by one of her own hair bands; the board on which the paper was stretched, propped up on the desk which he had made out of chipboard, carefully veneered in ash by hand to match the other furniture in their tiny, rented furnished flat; the small, tabby and white kitten, barely four months old, draped across his shoulders, playfully attempting to swat the end of his brush as it moved with each stroke; a time when love was the only thing that they had made together. She smiled to herself; remember why you are here, she thought.
"I am very impressed," she said, turning her head away from the paintings and towards him. "You have a truly beautiful talent. I am genuinely pleased that you have not had to compromise by having to share the mundane existence of work, sleep, work, and yet more work, the lot of the rest of us less talented fools, and I do mean that; it is not sarcasm. It must be so wonderful to be able to craft such beauty with your own hands, I cannot draw even a stick man very well, but then you were always very good with your hands."
"You are very kind," he said and ignored the possibility that there might be a 'double entendre' present in there somewhere; it would not be seemly to flirt with someone that he had hated with a vengeance for so long. Just be polite, he thought to himself. "Come and see the garden," he said suddenly. "We can look over it from here, it is perhaps a mite cold to be venturing outside in this wind and sleet is on the way or so I understand."
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