Charles De Lint: Memory and Dream

He tore the canvas from her easel and flung it across the room. Izzy watched in dismay as it struck a pile of Rushkin’s own canvases and they all went tumbling to the floor. Ignoring the clatter and possible damage to his paintings, Rushkin picked up the new canvas that Izzy had primed earlier this morning from where it leaned against the legs of her easel and set it up between the trays where the other had been. He grabbed the brush from Izzy’s hand.

“Look,” he commanded, pointing to the mirror that he’d set up in front of her easel the day before.

He pushed her forward so that her own reflection was prominent. “What do you see?”

“Me.”

“No. You see a person, a shape, nothing more. The sooner you stop relating what you see to what you think it should be and simply concentrate on the shapes and values of what you are seeing, the sooner you’ll be able to progress.”

He fell silent then. Studying her reflection for a few moments, he began to build up a figure on the canvas with quick deft strokes. Three, four—no more than a dozen—and Izzy could see herself, already recognizable, her own image looking back at her from the canvas. She looked as though she was standing in a cloud of mist.

“Now what do we have on the canvas?” Rushkin asked.

“Me?”

The brush moved again in his hand, adding darker values to the hair and skin tones, highlighting the idea of a cheekbone, exaggerating the shadow that held an eye.

“And now?”

The familiarity was gone. With two strokes he’d changed the image of herself into that of a stranger.

But oddly enough, the final effect made the image on the canvas seem more like her than it had been only moments before.

“This is what you want to find,” he told her. “Use what you see as a template, an idea, but draw the final image from here—” He tapped his head. ‘—and here—” Now he laid a hand against his belly.

“—or what you do is meaningless. You want to paint so that the subject on your canvas is something the viewer has never seen before, yet remains tantalizingly familiar. If you want to paint exactly what you see, you might as well become a photographer. Paint what you feel.”

“But your work’s realistic. Why should I have to—”

She never saw the blow coming. He struck her with his open hand but it was still enough to send her staggering. Her cheek burned and her head rang. Slowly she lifted a hand to her stinging cheek and stared at him through a blur of tears.

“What did I tell you about questioning me?” he shouted.

Izzy backed away. She was numb with shock, and scared.

Rushkin’s rage held for a moment longer; then the anger that had twisted his features into an even more grotesque appearance than usual fled. A look of contrition came over them and he seemed as shocked as she was at what he had just done.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I ... I had no right to do that.”

Izzy didn’t know how to respond. Her adrenaline level was still high, but her fright had now turned to anger. The last person to hit her had been a boyfriend she’d had during her last year of high school. After she finally managed to break up with him, she’d vowed never to let anyone hit her again.

Rushkin dropped her paintbrush into a jar of turpentine and shuffled over to the recamier. When he sat down, head bowed, gaze on the floor, he looked more than ever like a stone gargoyle, a small figure, lost and tragic, looking down at a world to which it could never belong.

“I’ll understand if you feel you have to go,” he said.

For a long moment, all Izzy could do was stand there and look at him. Her cheek still stung, her pulse still drummed far too fast. Slowly her gaze lifted from the dejected figure he presented to look about the studio. Rushkin’s masterpieces looked back at her from every wall and corner, stunning representations of an artist still at the peak of his career. She heard Kathy’s voice in her head, repeating something she’d said that afternoon Izzy had told her about her odd meeting with Rushkin.

I think you’re all mad. But that’s part and parcel of being an artistic genius, isn’t it?

Izzy didn’t know if it was madness, exactly. It was more like living on a tightrope of emotional intensity. Many of the great artists, if they didn’t have volatile temperaments, were at the least eccentric to some degree or another. It came, as Kathy had put it, with the territory. No one forced a person to associate with the more cantankerous representatives. People befriended artists such as Rushkin for any number of reasons, understanding that they would have to make compromises. The gallery owner stood to make money. The student hoped to learn.

So Izzy had taken Rushkin’s verbal abuse, because the trade-off had seemed worth it. He might be overbearing and self-centered, but god, could he paint. And even if she was no closer to winning his approval than she’d ever been to winning the approval of her parents, she was at least learning something here, which was more than had ever happened at home.

She would never forget the day that she was taking a break from weeding the vegetable garden, sitting under one of the old elms by the farmhouse, sketchbook on her knee. Her father had come upon her and flown into one of his typical rages. He hadn’t hit her, but he had torn up the sketchbook, destroying a month’s worth of work. For that, and for all the other ways that he tried to close up her spirit in the same kind of little box that held his own, Izzy would never forgive him.

Her attention turned from the offhand gallery of Rushkin’s work that surrounded her, back to Rushkin himself. Her cheek didn’t sting so much anymore and her shock was mostly gone. The anger was still present, but it had been oddly transferred to her father now. Her father, who, after he’d torn up her sketches that afternoon, told her that “all art is crap and all artists are fags and dykes. Is that what you want to grow up to be, Isabelle? A manhating dyke?”

In that sense, even with the red imprint of Rushkin’s hand on her cheek, she still felt as though they were compatriots in some great and worthy struggle, allies standing together against all those small-minded people such as her father who couldn’t conceive of art as being “real work.” Her father’s anger originated in his disdain for her and what she’d chosen to do with her life; Rushkin’s was simply born out of his frustration that she wasn’t doing it well enough. Not that she shouldn’t be doing it, but that she should be doing it better.

“It ... it’s okay,” she said.

Rushkin lifted his head, a hopeful look in those pale discerning eyes of his. “I mean, it’s not okay that you hit me,” she said. “It’s just ... let’s try to carry on.”

“I’m so very sorry,” he told her. “I don’t know what came over me. I just ... it’s that I feel time is running out and I have so much I want to pass on.”

“What do you mean, ‘time is running out’?” Izzy asked.

“Look at me. I’m old. Worn out. I have no family. No coterie of students to carry on my work.

There’s just you and me and I can’t seem to teach you fast enough. I get frustrated, knowing that I’m trying to force a lifetime of learning into whatever time we might have left.”

“Are you ... are you dying?”

Rushkin shook his head. “No more than we all are. Life is a terminal illness, after all. We have our allotment of years, and no more. I’ve lived long enough that my course is almost run now.”

Izzy gave him a worried look. How old was he, anyway? He didn’t look to be more than in his mid-fifties, but then, when she considered the dates on some of the canvases that hung in the Newford Museum of Fine Arts, she realized he probably had to be in his late seventies. Perhaps even his early eighties.