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“Remember,” he said, “these are over five years old. You might not like them – they might not live up to your expectations…”
Connie gave him a murderous glare of impatience and urged him to reveal the canvas. Suddenly the world seemed quiet to her. The sounds of the rain and wind seemed to fade, for all her attention was focused on the easel and what it held.
Blake sighed, and then drew away the dust cover.
Connie felt herself go cold with an unnatural chill. She took a step towards the painting, and then stopped herself. She stood, trembling, her eyes huge and dark in the paleness of her face, her lips parted as though the moment was somehow breathtaking and sensual.
The canvas was a couple of feet wide and perhaps eighteen inches high – not a large piece by modern standards, and yet the work seemed to explode at her in a clamor of surging sensations. It was a Blake McGrath seascape, painted with the master’s unique touch of drama and pathos.
The painting showed a rugged stretch of distant coastline, greyed and blurred by a sullen sky, yet in the midst of the clouds was a shaft of golden light, breaking through the overcast and spilling its color onto the sandy foreground. On the beach was the tragic figure of an elderly man, his head bowed, standing amidst the broken ruins of an old boat while the ice green swells of an angry ocean burst upon mid-distant rocks in explosions of white spray. There was something haunting about the work, and in the way the man and boat had been rendered, so that Connie felt inexplicably saddened. She covered her mouth with her hand and stared at Blake with a gaze of bewildered awe.
“How do you do that?” she whispered hoarsely. “How do you capture such powerful emotion on canvas?”
Blake frowned, bemused. He leaned over the painting and glanced at it. He remembered the work, recalled the difficulty depicting the shaft of sunlight. He had been pleased with the finished painting, but now Connie’s profound reaction forced him to take another look at the work. Technically it was good.
“It’s just a painting,” he said.
She looked appalled. She shook her head. “No,” she said dramatically. “It’s not. It’s a gift, Blake. It’s something in the way you work the paint, some part of you that’s infused into the image. It’s as if you can create intense emotion through paint.”
Blake felt a rush of relieved delight. For some reason he didn’t understand, this woman’s approval of his art was important to him.
Connie came to the easel and bent close to the painting, her eyes alight, her expression rapt as she gasped at the intricate little details that combined to give the work dimension. Blake watched her with secret pleasure. Her hair was drying and he could see delicate little whorls around her ear, like fine and silky breaths of perfection. He inhaled the fresh scent of her and was mesmerized by the interlace of her long lashes when she blinked. He had the sudden reckless urge to reach out and caress the flawless skin of her cheek with the tips of his fingers, and the insane shock of it made his senses tilt.
Connie turned her head then, looked deep into his eyes for a solemn moment that seemed to stretch like the soulful caress of a lover’s fingers, until at last Blake flinched and glanced away.
“Do you want to see more?” he asked brusquely, his voice too loud in his own ears. He strode across to the storage rack and fetched one of the bigger paintings. His fingers were trembling.
Connie hooded her eyes but there was an enigmatic Mona Lisa smile on her lips. She nodded her head without speaking.
Blake scooped up the first seascape, wrapped it with perfunctory tosses of his hands, and set it on the studio floor. He stood the new canvas on the crossbar of the easel and at last cast his eyes back to where Connie waited.
“This one is called ‘Daybreak’,” he said. “It was my favorite piece. I was going to make it the feature painting for the exhibition, and use the image for the gallery catalogue and marketing launch,” he explained. “It’s the closest I ever came to being satisfied with one of my own works.”
He took a step back and unveiled the painting with a little flourish.
Connie felt a rush of blood flush across her cheeks and her heart slammed hard against her chest.
The painting was three feet wide and two feet high, a view from a high cliff top that depicted a panoramic scene of the ocean in all its furious majesty. Under a pale dawn sky, shot through with the colors of sunrise, was a heaving swell exploding upon craggy sentinels of rock. The moment had been captured when the wave was sweeping towards the shore, the green boiling surf just beginning to curl and break.
“It’s a masterpiece,” Connie breathed. She felt overwhelmed. There was vibrancy in the colors and a hulking energy in the wave that was utterly stunning.
Blake shook his head. “There is no such thing as a masterpiece any more,” he said, and Connie flashed him a withering glare, as though, surely, there was no painting quite so perfect as this.
“That’s just a hackneyed term people use,” Blake went on. “It has no relevance nor significance.” He tossed the dust cloth down on the chair and went to stand beside Connie, staring back at the painting as he spoke.
She felt the casual brush of his shoulder against hers and she did not move away. “I think you’re being very humble,” she said softly, as though she was gazing at some revered religious artifact.
“No, I’m serious,” he said, and turned to look at her. “Masterpieces were exactly what paintings once were,” he explained. “They were works of art painted by a master. Back in the sixteenth and seventeen centuries, in particular, an artist was a qualified tradesman, just like builders are now, for example. Artists served an apprenticeship of several years during which they actually learned every facet of the craft, from canvas preparation to mixing paint. At the end of their time they were masters. A painting made by a master was a master piece.” He saw in Connie’s eyes that she was listening with fascination, though he suspected this was something she would already have known. “These days, anyone can paint – anyone can buy brushes and a canvas and then sell their work. There are no great masters anymore, and with their demise went the right to claim any modern painting as a master piece.”
Blake fell silent. Connie turned her eyes back to the beautiful painting. Beside this man, she felt like she was standing in the protective shelter of some great stone pillar. At last the temptation of the art became too much. She crept quietly towards the easel and began to pour over the intricate way the wave and white cascades of water had been replicated.
“Your brushwork intrigues me,” Connie said when she was only inches away from the painting. “Most artists who work in oils are always so thick with the paint, as though they use it to help create textures and dimensions. Even a lot of the great past masters did that,” she turned and glanced over her shoulder. “But in your paintings, it’s like the paint just melts into the canvas. It’s very unique.”
Blake twisted the corner of his mouth into a little smile, as though this was a comment he had heard about his work countless times in the past. “I guess I could have done the same kind of thing,” he admitted. “Like most painters, I was certainly influenced by the old masters… but I suppose I just have a different way of working. It’s not something I ever really set out to do. What you see in that painting is just a style thing.”
From somewhere else in the house a clock chimed several times. It was a dull sound, muted through closed doors. Ned suddenly raised his head, the dog’s expression a sad eyed question. Blake nodded, and the Great Dane lifted himself slowly to his feet on arthritic legs and crept quietly from the room.
Connie turned from the canvas and smiled up into Blake’s face curiously. “Where is he going?”
“The beach.”
“Why?”
“Because he goes down to the beach every night at this time,” Blake said. His voice had become hollow, and his brow had corrugated into a deep frown.
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“Why?”
“To sit,” there was a strain creeping into his tone like a warning.
“For how long?” Connie softened her voice and tried to take the edge off her question.
“Until sunrise.”
Connie wanted to know more, but Blake’s eyes had become flinty and there was a rigid defiant set to his shoulders.
“How old is Ned?” she asked instead.
“Six,” he said.
Connie sensed she had brushed against a part of Blake’s life that was still like a tender wound, raw and painful. She had stirred memories and regrets within him and she wished vainly for some way to retrieve the intimacy – to be able to turn time back to when they had been discussing his art. It seemed suddenly that the small distance between them had become an icy crevasse.
“Do you want me to go?” she asked timidly. She rose then, facing him across the space.
“No,” he said. His mouth was drawn into a thin pale line, and Connie could sense some inner struggle behind his eyes.
“Can you tell me about your technique?” she offered. “Did you paint from photographs?”
It was an olive branch extended; an invitation for him to rejoin her and reach across the void. Blake nodded his head stiffly, and began to speak again. At first his words were stilted, his posture still reserved, but gradually the color came back into his voice and Connie silently rejoiced in the passion that rose from within him as they talked deep into the night.
“I used photographs for reference,” Blake showed her a drawer of images that had been the foundation of some of his best-known earlier paintings. “Nature is too fluid – a beautiful woman with an ever changing countenance – so that to try to capture an instant of her glory is impossible for a plein air painter,” he said. “So I would take photographs, and from those I would choose the moment I thought she was at her most glorious, or her most terrifying. Then I would paint live.”
