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“I’d like that.”
27
EMMA
When Jackson told me to get dressed so we could visit one of his favorite places, I didn’t know what to expect. The weather was warm for a winter day, so I wore a short tartan skirt and a tank top, with a dark cardigan in case it became cold. I thought maybe he was planning to take me to a restaurant or shopping strip.
I wasn’t expecting an art gallery.
It was an old sandstone building, constructed in the 1800s and renovated twenty years ago. Jackson turned into the underground carpark and removed the ticket out to release the boom gate.
“When was the last time you saw paintings and sculptures up close and personal?” he asked, as he circled through the dark levels to a part of the carpark that was almost empty.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Probably when I was at school.” I’d gone on field trips to museums and galleries when I was young, where we walked in pairs and were repeatedly told not to touch anything. The experience had been boring — while I liked art, none of us cared about the stuffy attitudes and do-not-touch signs. We wanted to run through the wide corridors, climb the sculptures, and scream under the high ceilings to hear how loudly our voices would echo.
“Well, be prepared to see it through new eyes,” Jackson said. “Tattooing the same things day in, day out can get repetitive, and sometimes I forget what drew me to art in the first place. This is one of my favorite places to come when I’m stressed, or when I need to see the world from a different perspective.”
He locked the car, and we took the stairs up to the lobby, where the attendant smiled and gave us a pamphlet.
“Would you like the join the tour?” she asked, as she gestured to a group of people who were milling around next to an abstract sculpture. “It’s leaving in ten minutes.”
“Thanks, but we’ll be okay,” Jackson said. “Do you have any new exhibitions?”
The attendant nodded. “Through those doors — there’s a Renaissance exhibition that’s only here until Thursday.”
“What do you say?” Jackson asked me.
It didn’t seem like my thing, but Jackson’s eyes had lit up and I didn’t want to deprive him of something he wanted to see.
“Sounds good,” I lied.
He led me through the double doors into a huge exhibition space that was divided by temporary walls, turning it into a maze. Framed paintings hung under bright spotlights, spaced far enough apart that we could look at each one without seeing the others in our peripheral vision.
As I’d expected, they wereterrible.
We wandered past the first couple: a milkmaid with a cow, a portrait of a nobleman, an old man reading a book. The subjects were stiff, the paint was cracked, the proportions looked wrong, and for some reason, the artists all used a huge amount of pink paint.
“Look at this,” Jackson said, stopping next to a painting of a woman in a kitchen, painted in oils on a wooden board. “Isn’t it brilliant?”
I gave him a side-eye, wondering if he was being sarcastic, but his enthusiasm looked genuine.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Absolutely,” he said. “Look at these lines…” Obeying the signs that said “do not touch”, Jackson stood two feet back from the painting and moved his pointed finger through the air in front of it. His finger traveled in a straight line up the woman’s thigh, the space above it, and the kitchen wall. Then he moved it again from the top corner of the artwork, tracing an imaginary line between the other wall, the woman’s neck, and her outstretched leg. “De Gaudi must have worked on the composition for weeks before he touched this board,” he said.
I hadn’t noticed any of this at first glance — it looked as planned as the photos I’d snapped on my phone — but now Jackson had pointed it out, I could see how the lines connected together.
“And this window up the back here,” he said, pointing to the small rectangle that both lines passed through, “This is the vanishing point.”
I remembered my eighth grade art teacher talking about perspective like this — she’d drawn a huge X on the whiteboard and told us to imagine the lower space was a road leading to the horizon, and she’d filled it in with buildings and cars that, as she worked, began to look real. The center of the X, she said, was the vanishing point, where all the parts of the image converged.
It was hard, back then, to see how it would apply to a real painting — but Jackson’s explanation made more sense.
“Why did they use so much pink in the past?” I asked. The woman’s dress was pink, as were the kitchen door and the decorative tiling in the kitchen. “Was it the cheapest color?”
“That’s red,” Jackson explained. “Out of all the colors, red pigments fade the fastest. These paintings have been stored in a temperature-controlled environment, away from sunlight, but after several centuries, fading is inevitable.”
I tilted my head to one side, trying to imagine what the artwork might have looked like when it was first created, and I wondered if the faces would have been more realistic if they hadn’t faded.
