“a line here, and here, and here”

From a recently completed essay, “Let a body venture at last out of its shelter”:

...a line here, and here, and here

My friend, visiting from the Netherlands, carries a ladder into the stairwell to lift the painting down from its hook. I have looked at it for decades, my younger self behind glass, a few white flowers strewn in my hair. We carry the painting to the long pine table and I brush the winter’s dust off the frame. My friend, an artist, tells me the work was done on canvas board. He shows me how the ground would have been prepared – dark, on the white board—and how the outline of the head (my head) was sketched with a few dark brushstrokes. He follows the line. We talk about the mechanics of making a work like this one. Colour from a tube, the brushes, the places where the pigment is thick because perhaps the brush was dirty and he scuffed off the paint. Probably done in one session, my friend says. The strokes are quick. We look at the eyes (my eyes), the nose, the blue of the waistcoat, strokes of the same colour along the right shoulder. The hair he thinks was black with some blue. Shall we take it out of its frame, he asks. Who knows what we might find behind the backing.

The backing is cardboard, taped together with masking tape.There is an inscription on the back, wishing the recipient (my daughter) a happy life. Tiny nails hold the cardboard against the frame; my friend removes them with needle-nose pliers. We lift away the back and the same inscription is written across the underside of the canvas board. It was so long ago: 15th of June, 1993. My daughter would have been nearly 8 years old, the same age as Gina in her ballet leotard in one of my favourite paintings of her.

In the day’s clear light, my hair is not black and blue but deep burgundy. From the distance of the stairs below, my hair was lustrous, my skin smooth, but close up, I can see some of the oil has separated from the pigment and shows as a smear, spackled with faint white lines. My mouth is lovely. My friend shows me how the flowers in my hair might have been an afterthought, a way to use up some white paint on a brush that has limned the deep v of my neck.

I see the haste of this work, the urge to put the young poet down on canvas, the firm line of the right part of my head. I see how he would have sketched with a brush dipped in black, a line here, and here, and here. My friend shows how the eyes are not symmetrical and they are the eyes I see in the mirror every day, not symmetrical, but these are not looking at me, not directly; they are implicating me in something I am only now discovering.