BLANK CANVAS
to Paula Morais
.
Directly before him the painter sees the easel, and resting upon it a canvas of reasonable dimensions, immaculately white. The painter is seated. His eyes—we observe them—are fixed on the void, his hands still, one cupped gently over the other.
Beside him, on the atelier’s only table, lies a multitude of tools: palette knives, mixing trays, jars of resin, thinners, aerosols, palettes, brushes, strands of raffia, a wooden mannequin, spattered newspapers.
The painter has arranged side by side, in small mounds of coloured powder, all the pigments he has used throughout his life: lead white, gypsum, barite, chalk, iron oxide, charcoal, lapis lazuli, cobalt compound, azurite, malachite, viridian, chrome green, verdigris, saffron, limonite, gold dust, pepper-gold, Naples yellow, lead antimoniate, ochre, carmine, vermilion, hematite, cadmium red, burnt sienna, titanium dioxide, bitumen. The sight of these elements so displayed brings us delight. It recalls a Moroccan bazaar, brimming with spices.
The painter feels his mind ablaze. At eighty years of age, his eyes falter, yet his vision remains clear, saturated with contrast, rich in texture and detail. In a fascination tinged with nostalgia, he contemplates the blank canvas. It is a seminal moment. All is still possible. But the instant the first brushstroke crosses the fibrous weave, he will be demoted to the human condition. It is the paradox that has haunted him all his life.
Images come to him vertiginously, as if spinning through a kaleidoscope’s lens. Each image is at once simultaneous and part of all the others.
The painter is now lying in a park. He observes, in the style of suprematism, a lichen creeping up the branch of an elm, and the gentle swaying of twigs and small trembling, light-filled leaves.
And he sees a dotted, grapefruit-hued sun setting over the arabesque towers and vast heliotrope-strewn plains of Andalusia.
And he sees, cubistically, the marvellous designs of Chartres Cathedral, illuminating a morning of churning innards and lost faith.
And he sees, as Monet might, the whitewashed balconies and domes of Crete, the red columns of the palace of Knossos, and the paradisical blue and white peace of Santorini.
And, in surrealist fashion, he sees a gauzy moon drifting amongst the hieroglyphic columns of Luxor.
And he sees, as Van Gogh might have done, the terraced rice fields of Cambodia, the terracotta soldiers of Emperor Qin Shi Huang, and the gardens of Kyoto, full of silence and shadow.
And he sees, like Jackson Pollock, the frenzied anthill of the streets in Tokyo, Shanghai, and Sydney.
He sees himself, young once more, making love to a woman on an atoll in Micronesia. Meticulous, solemn, absorbed by the chromatic nuance of each memory, he reconstructs—like Gauguin—the green-blue waters of the Pacific, a mirror to the eyes where, for the first time, he discovered in love his own enraptured face.
And, at a ranch in the Brazilian sertão, upon a linen cloth, he sees in chiaroscuro the gleam of a copper jug among orchids and tropical fruits. Not even the Italians of the Renaissance nor the Flemish masters of the golden age could have rendered it with greater genius.
And he sees, atop a mountain in the Atacama Desert, the colossal language of the universe, with its countless symbols of constellations and cosmic dust. Were he Kandinsky, this would be his painting.
And he sees, on a park bench in Central Park, a Native American woman, dressed in the venerable attire of the Sioux, gazing at the orange-tinted clouds over Manhattan—clouds that seem to her the same as those at twilight in her small town on the banks of the Missouri. Vieira da Silva, for instance, would have loved such a portrait.
The painter now sees, with remarkable clarity, the sooty crowd emerging from the bowels of a coal mine in Botswana. He sees the deep lines and furrows on the faces of young black men and the arachnid complexity of machines (conveyor belts, gears, and tilting arms) that make the landscape more arid still. He sees the vast chasms opened in the scarred rock, and the name of a multinational corporation atop one of the abysses. One worker brings both hands to his mouth to stifle a cough. The painter sees how the emaciated earth absorbs the blood-flecked sputum, and how no one around seems to care. So it is, the price of human life. Diego Rivera, Mario Sironi, and Jean-Michel Basquiat would have depicted it in ways as distinct as they are unforgettable.
And he sees an oasis in the Maghreb, with its jubilant palms and sycamores, and a caravan gliding thirstily over the reddish dunes. And he sees the Strait of Messina, the Pillars of Hercules, and the rugged coastline of Cantabria with its line of mighty lighthouses. The painter now sees the pure green of Ireland, the ruined castles of Scotland, the great albatrosses cutting through the Atlantic’s waves and tempests. And he sees, on the broad ocean horizon, the silver synchrony of an entire shoal of sardines, and the fervent breath of a blue whale in Greenland, and the tiny Portuguese trawlers confronting the vastness. Caspar David Friedrich and William Turner would have found in these seascapes the supreme heroism of solitude…
The painter now sees his childhood. As though portrayed by Joaquín Sorolla, he is playing on the sands of a nearly deserted beach. There is seaweed and wrack, shells and the scent of brine. In his pale, frozen hands he holds the still-living body of a clownfish cast ashore: a marvel of colour and ocean currents. That day, he knew it—his fate would be this: to colour the void!
At eighty, perhaps he has lived it all.
On the blank canvas he sees (though he cannot say whether in a classical, allegorical, romantic, pre-Raphaelite, impressionist, expressionist, surrealist, dadaist, conceptualist, neo-conceptualist or neo-expressionist style) the lit and shadowed forms of his own soul—and the soul of all humanity. It is a masterwork, the summation of his talent, dreams, and refined knowledge.
The finest gallery is ready to pay him a fortune for an original painting, the labour of a lifetime, his magnum opus. For this work!
The easel remains still, the canvas untouched. Without moving, eyes closed, the painter perceives all the unnamed colours, shapes, and textures. He knows that the first gesture would compromise his vision forever. In its whiteness, the canvas holds all his genius—magnificent, untranslatable, and divine.
Thus he shall deliver it.
