Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

“Maybe I could meet him somewhere else,” Izzy said.

“Maybe,” Rothwindle agreed, but it never did seem to work out.

So Paddyjack’s painting, like John’s The Spirit Is Strong, were among the few paintings that Izzy wouldn’t put into a show or even give away. They had to make the decision for themselves, and so far as she was concerned, their absence told her where they stood. Except for them, none of the other numena seemed much concerned that Rushkin was any sort of a threat, and in time Izzy found herself feeling the same way.

VI

April 1976

Izzy’s third show at The Green Man Gallery was her first to have an overall theme. She called it Your Streets Are Not Mine and used it as a way of exploring the presence of her numena in the city. Each piece contained a strange element, a jolt of the unexpected that could often be missed if the viewer wasn’t paying enough attention. It might be the glimpse of a sunlit meadow, ablaze with wild-flowers, that appeared in the rearview mirror of a yellow cab driving down a benighted Newford street, the pavement slick with rain, the reflections of the neon lights in the puddles broken and distorted by the spray of passing vehicles. It might be the leonine main figure of Grace, the tufts of bobcat hair rising from the points of her tapered ears mostly hidden by the spill of her cascading red-gold hair. Or it might be the painting from which the show took its title, which depicted a row of gargoyles crouching on a grey stone cornice, looking down at the busy street below; most people missed the fact that the figure on the far right, half-secreted in shadow, was a real boy rather than a stone figure.

After a lot of soul searching she’d finally let herself be convinced to hang a few of her numena paintings in the show. It wasn’t until the theme took shape in her mind that she realized how necessary those paintings would be to its success. She was careful, as always, not to make the numena too outlandish in appearance so that they could fit in more easily when they wandered about the city, but once the decision to include them was made, she felt as though a great weight had been lifted from her.

She continued to feel responsible for the numena, but finally came to accept that it really was their decision to cross over or not, to have their paintings remain in the studio or go out into the world. They had lives of their own that had only as much to do with her as the friendships she made with a few of them, and in some ways she was happy to see the paintings gain a wider audience, rather than have them stockpiling in her studio. She wasn’t like Rushkin in that sense. Art, she believed, was made to be seen, not squirreled away. At the sums these paintings were selling for—Albina had priced them all in the fifteen-hundred—to three-thousand-dollar range—she was sure that their owners would take good care of them and the numena would remain safe from harm.

Albina was delighted by the decision and priced the three numena paintings—Grace, Your Streets Are Not Mine and one of a scarecrow-like figure chasing crows from a back lane garden, called Why the Crows Fly—at the high end of the show’s price scale. They were her favorites of the fourteen paintings in the show and were also the ones most singled out by reviewers. There was so much positive response to them that Izzy almost regretted not putting her other completed numena paintings in the show, but they hadn’t seemed to fit in as well with the theme.

The show took a little longer to sell out, but that, Albina assured her, was only because people were more cautious with their checkbooks once the art entered this price range.

“Trust me, Isabelle,” she said. “We can consider this show an unqualified success and a harbinger of even more success to come.”

One of the real surprises of the show, insofar as Izzy was concerned, was making a reacquaintance with one of her fellow students from her last year at Butler U. She spotted him at the opening, all freckles, tousled red hair and rumpled clothes, and remembered thinking, Oh god, Thomas Downs. Why did he have to come? In class he’d always seemed so full of himself, and she’d hated the way he constantly argued about fine art versus commercial. He had little good to say about any of the professors at the university, singling out Professor Dapple in particular, which hadn’t endeared him to Jilly either. He wasn’t even in any of Dapple’s classes.

Izzy hid a grimace when he came up to her, but she wasn’t able to hide her surprise at what he had to say.

“I owe you an apology,” he said.

“You do?”

He gave her a disarming smile. “Oh, it’s nothing I’ve ever said or done.”

“That doesn’t leave much to apologize for.”

Tom tapped a finger against his temple. “It’s the way I’ve thought about your work in the past. You see, I’ve always dismissed you as a Rushkin-wannabe—”

“But now you’ve found out that I studied under him,” Izzy finished for him, “so you’ve changed your mind.” This was so boring. She couldn’t count the number of times she’d heard variations on this theme.

“Not at all.” Tom waved a hand in the general direction of her paintings. “These changed my mind.”

“I don’t get it. I can see Rushkin’s influence in each one of them.”

Tom nodded. “Yes, but that’s because you’re now seeing things the way he might have—distilled through your own ability to perceive the world around you, to be sure, but you’re obviously now using the tools of vision that he taught you to use rather than merely aping his style. Your earlier work didn’t have this sense of vision—personal, or Rushkin’s.”

“Well, thanks very much.”

“Don’t get me wrong. I know how hard a process this can be. I had the same early luck as you, except I got to study under Erica Keane—you know her work?”

“Oh, please,” Izzy said. “Give me some credit.”

Keane was only one of the most respected watercolorists in the country, at the top of her field in the same way that Rushkin was in his. She had a studio in Lower Crowsea and Izzy had been there once during the annual tour of artists’ studios that the Newford School of Art organized every spring. She’d come away stunned at the woman’s control of her medium.

“I’m sorry,” Tom said. “You know how close-minded people can be when it comes to a discipline other than their own.”

“I suppose.”

“You’d be surprised at how many oil painters don’t recognize her name, little say have any familiarity with her work.”

“I love her mixed-media work,” Izzy said. “Especially her ink-and-watercolor pieces.”

Tom smiled. “Me, too. But to get back to my point, my work’s been saddled with endless comparisons to hers just because I’ve studied under her, but what the critics seem to miss is that what a good mentor teaches his or her students isn’t simple technique and style, but the way in which they view the world. We can’t help but incorporate that way of seeing things into our own work and because of that, because a Keane or a Rushkin has such a unique perspective on things, I think it’s a little harder for their students to break free and paint with their own—shall we say, ‘voice.’

“You’re beginning to do that with the work I see here tonight and I admire you for it because I haven’t been able to do the same thing myself—or at least not yet—and that’s why I felt I owed you an apology. You might be a wannabe, but what you want to be is your own woman and you’re making remarkable inroads to attaining that goal.”

Izzy gave him a long searching look, certain that he was making fun of her, but the gaze he returned was guileless.