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They pulled up, gasping and laughing before a medium-sized delivery truck, its engine still belching diesel exhaust. A dazed driver in a blue sweat-stained uniform climbed down from the cab. He was holding a clipboard and wore the harried, slightly bewildered expression of a man who had driven towards the ends of the earth – and finally found it.
He pushed the cap he was wearing to the back of his head.
“I am looking for Miss Connie Dixon.”
Blake stepped forward. “That’s me,” he said with a straight face. Connie punched him on the arm.
The man went to the back of the truck and carried a cardboard box to Connie. “From New York,” the driver said and then squinted at his clipboard. “Cartwright Gallery. I’ll need you to sign for the delivery.”
Blake carried the box inside for her and set it on the living room floor. He went into the kitchen, found a pair of scissors, and came back brandishing them. Connie flung her body over the box as though he was about to do murder.
“No!” she squealed. “You can’t see my paintings.”
Blake stopped dead. “You’re kidding, right?”
“No, I am most certainly not,” Connie clutched the box protectively to her. “They’re not good enough for you to see. They were painted years ago.”
“But Connie, I want to see them.”
She shook her head. “I would be too embarrassed.”
Blake set the scissors down. “I showed you all of my old paintings,” he said reasonably. “It’s only fair that you should show me your work.”
“Blake, we’re in different leagues!” Connie’s voice became a whine. “I was an amateur. I didn’t have your skill, your experience, or your knowledge. My work compared to yours would be…”
“Leave me to be the judge of that,” Blake softened his voice, like he was trying to gently coax a jumper off a ledge. “And besides,” he laid down his trump card, wrapping his tongue gloatingly around his next words, “you promised there would be no more secrets between us, remember?”
Connie capitulated with a groan of despair. She made a sad face, one last silent plea for mercy. Blake shook his head with a half-smile on his lips.
“Okay,” she pouted. “But let me take them into the studio and arrange them. When I have them displayed, I will call out to you.”
She went down the corridor and slammed the door to the studio closed behind her. Blake paced across the floor like an impatient parent in a waiting room, and it was almost an hour before he heard the faint strain of her voice, a conflict of excitement and trepidation. He went towards the studio and stopped dramatically in the doorway.
There were a dozen small paintings on display, each one about a foot square. Connie had set two of them side-by-side on the easel’s crossbar, and a couple more against the window. The rest were dispersed around the studio walls. None of the paintings were framed.
Connie stood in the middle of the floor, her arms folded across her chest and her bottom lip trapped between her teeth. She watched Blake’s face closely, and he realized she was anxiously reading his expression.
He went slowly towards the two paintings that she had displayed on the easel. One was a still life, with a bowl of grapes in the center of the canvas. Behind the bowl he could see the folds of a curtain. He picked up his glasses, set them on the end of his nose, then turned his attention to the adjoining piece. It was a painting of a seascape – a single wave curling out of the ocean with a foaming white crest. Blurred into the far distance, seeming to float on the horizon line, was a non-descript headland. Blake folded his glasses and slipped them into his shirt pocket.
He went around the room, looking at the rest of Connie’s paintings. His expression was rigid, his gaze sweeping over each piece, then coming back again as he inspected them more carefully. At last, Connie could stand the strain of his silence not a minute longer.
“Well?” she gasped, as if she had been holding her breath. “Tell me what you think, and don’t spare my feelings. I don’t want you to be nice to me, I want you to be honest.”
Blake looked at her sharply. “You really want me to be honest?”
“Yes,” Connie said firmly, and then added in a meek, faltering voice, “I think so…”
He intimidated her. He was Blake McGrath, the finest artist in the world and by far the most successful realism painter she had ever studied. He was a living legend, and suddenly the realization of his reputation made her inwardly cringe.
He went back to the still life on the easel and picked it up carefully. He peered close to the canvas for another long moment, and then looked up at Connie. He took a deep breath.
“If your aim was to paint in a naïve style, similar to, say, Henri Rousseau, I would say you definitely have some potential,” Blake said carefully. “I see the same simplicity, without some of the detail work the Frenchman was known for.” He set the canvas down and picked up the seascape. “As primitive Post-Impressionist pieces, then they are quite good.”
Connie nodded. She didn’t smile with relief, or gratitude. She simply inclined her head and urged Blake to continue.
Blake looked back at the seascape in his hands and shrugged.
“However, if you were trying to paint in the style of Realism…” his voice trailed away to silence because he decided tactfully that the rest of his conclusion was better left unsaid.
“Go on…” Connie said sweetly, and Blake was instantly alarmed. There was ice in her voice and he felt the ground beneath him suddenly become precarious with looming peril.
“No,” Blake said and hung his most charming smile from the corner of his mouth. He shrugged. “Connie, art is all subject to interpretation. The way one person sees art is always different to the way another person views it. In fact it’s the same with music, films, books… everyone is going to have a different opinion, and there is nothing that makes one person right, and another person wrong.” Blake glanced at the studio door and tried to calculate his chances of escaping down the hallway safely. Connie was circling him and her mouth seemed frozen and covered in crystals of ice. There was a sparkle in her eyes like the pointed tip of a stiletto.
“I’d like to hear your interpretation,” Connie insisted. “As the best realism painter in the world, and the darling of the critics, you above everyone else must be eminently qualified to critique my work – my realism paintings.”
Blake was trapped. The slippery ground beneath him was cracking wide open into fissures. He took another breath, realizing that Connie would not be deflected.
“Okay,” he said at last. “As realism paintings, they are awful.”
He braced himself. Connie made her eyes wide and artless, and for a moment Blake was unsure of her reaction. He rushed to fill the void, hoping to minimize the damage to her feelings. “The difference is brush mileage,” he explained. “You said yourself that you only focused on your art for a limited time. Connie, I’ve had years and years at an easel. Of course you can’t compare your experience to mine. At the same stage in our careers, your paintings were probably better than the work I had created.” He threw the compliment out and hoped she would be mollified.
Connie came towards him with a slow kind of stealth that made him nervous. There was a smile fixed on her face, but it looked perilously close to a snarl.
“Then perhaps you will gi
ve me an art lesson?” she asked with delicate sweetness. “Perhaps the great man can show me some of his legendary secret tips and techniques…”
Blake thought quickly. “Will it get me out of the dog house?”
Connie arched her eyebrows. “It might.”
He nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Choose an image you want to paint and I’ll show you some of the things I discovered – but only if you stop looking like that. You look scary.”
Connie gave a little grin of triumph.
44.
In a quiet moment of reflection, Connie realized that her own passion to be a painter had never left – the flame had still flickered. Duncan Cartwright had cruelly tried to extinguish her dream and so – with no other apparent alternative – she forsook the desire to become an artist and instead fostered a fresh dream to own an art gallery. Owning a gallery would give her the opportunity to remain involved in the industry, even if she couldn’t earn a living from creating her own works.
Now, she had the opportunity to learn painting techniques from Blake McGrath, and the prospect filled her with extraordinary excitement, so that she spent the afternoon pouring through the thousands of seascape images Blake had photographed throughout his career, each picture filed and referenced on a memory stick.
Quite suddenly, the dream she had abandoned sparked into flame again – not so bright that she would ever abort her plans to open her gallery – but enough to inspire her to re-explore her love of painting, even just as an enthusiastic hobbyist.
“I chose this one,” she came at last to Blake and showed him the photo on her laptop. It was a photo he had taken many years ago depicting a steep ledge of sand dunes in the foreground leading down onto a golden sandy beach. The mid-distance showed a procession of waves rolling in to the shore, and then a far-off headland under a warm afternoon sky. Blake glanced at the image and nodded his head.
“Fine,” he said. “Now you need to choose a canvas and then project the image.”
