Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

“I didn’t know what you were doing.”

“Lecturing, Isabelle. Lecturing and touring and studying the masters, when I had the time, because one can never learn too much from those gifted ones who went before us.”

He led her across the studio to the window seat and sat her down where the air from the heat vent rose up and warmed her. Without waiting to ask her, he fetched her a mug of tea from the thermos he kept on the worktable and brought it back to where she was sitting. Izzy gratefully cradled it in her hands and let the warm steam rise up to tickle her cheeks.

“I got your letters,” she said after she’d taken a sip. “I found them really helpful.”

“Then it was worth the time I took to write them.”

“I couldn’t tell where you were when you mailed them—the postmarks were all smudged.”

Rushkin shrugged. “Here and there—who can remember?”

“I was surprised that you even had a chance to see the shows.”

“What? And miss such important moments in the life of my only and best student?”

Izzy couldn’t help but bask in the warmth of his praise. When she looked about the studio, she saw that it was full of paintings and sketches again, only they were all unfamiliar. Some looked as thought they’d been painted in Greece or Italy or southern Spain. Others reminded her of the Middle East, Africa, northern Europe, the Far East. Landscapes and portraits and every sort of combination of the two.

“I only wish I could have been in town for the openings,” Rushkin went on, “but my schedule being what it was, I was lucky to be able to fly in and see the shows at all.”

Izzy wanted to ask why he hadn’t stopped by the studio, but the question made her feel uneasy because she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer. She didn’t fear Rushkin simply for the sake of her numena or because of his temper. There was a darker undercurrent to her fear that she couldn’t quite pinpoint. Whenever she reached for it, it sidled away into the shadowed corners of her mind that she could never quite clear away.

“You’ve been busy,” she said instead, indicating the new paintings. “Indeed I have. And you?”

“I suppose. But not like this.”

She felt warmer now. Still holding her mug, she walked about the studio, admiring the new work. It never ceased to amaze her how, after all the years Rushkin had been painting—and especially when you considered the sheer quantity of superior work he’d produced—he never failed to find a fresh perspective, the outlook that other artists invariably missed. No matter how prosaic his subject matter might appear at an initial glance, he had a gift for instilling in it a universal relevance. His use of light was as astounding as ever, and looking at this new work, Izzy felt the inspiration for a dozen paintings come bubbling up inside her.

“I’d like to see some of your current projects,” Rushkin said. “Perhaps I could come by your studio one afternoon.”

“I’m kind of in between studios at the moment,” Izzy told him. “Well, when you get settled into a new place then.”

Izzy was surprised at the disappointment she felt when he didn’t try to convince her to come back and work here with him. Instead, he joined her as she walked about the studio and spoke about the various paintings and sketches, gossiping about the places and people they depicted, explaining particular problems he’d had with certain pieces and how he’d solved them. By the time she left Izzy realized that she’d learned more in the few hours she’d spent just listening to him than she had in all the time he’d been gone.

It was with real regret that she finally left the studio and trudged back home through the cold.

XV

June 1978

Izzy finally got herself a new studio at the beginning of April. It was no more than a large empty loft in a refurbished factory on Kelly Street, but she loved it. Up to that point she’d been depending on the kindness of others for studio space—initially Rushkin, then Professor Dapple—so this was the very first time she had a place of her own, chosen by herself, for herself. She paid the rent and utilities. She was entirely responsible for its upkeep. And because it was her own place—rather than Rushkin’s, which she knew she had to keep private even when none of his work was in it—this year she was able to participate in the annual spring tour of artists’ studios organized by the Newford School of Art, something she’d wanted to do from the first time she moved to the city. She didn’t have much available for sale, but everything she did have sold on the first day.

There were things she had to get used to with the new studio, beyond having to cover her expenses.

The hardest thing was losing touch with most of her numena. In the period between moving from the coach house to finally finding her own place, those whose paintings she still kept hadn’t liked to visit her in the apartment. It wasn’t private enough for their tastes. They came less and less often until, by the time she moved into her Kelly Street studio, her only regular visitors were Annie Nin and Rothwindle.

Rosalind and Cosette still came by whenever they were in town, but that wasn’t all that often. The rest of her numena seemed to just drift out of her life. Most of them she saw about as often as she did John, and she had yet to meet Paddyjack.

Her art took a new direction when she was finally settled in enough to begin work. Inspired by the paintings that Rushkin had done on his travels—taken mostly by how, as Tom Downs had put it, Rushkin saw things, rather than simply his technique she embarked on an ambitious series depicting the architecture of Lower Crowsea, juxtapositioning the vanishing older buildings with those that were replacing them, or had been renovated. What she found particularly intriguing in working on the series was giving a sense of entire buildings while concentrating only on a few details in each painting: a doorway and its surrounding vine-draped brickwork and windows; an alleyway with an old grocery on one side, a new lawyer’s office on the other; the cornice of the old fire hall showing two of its gargoyles, behind which rose a refurbished office block with all new stonework and an additional two stories.

Figures appeared, where appropriate, in a few pieces, but only one had a new numena. She was a kind of Paddyjill, since she looked to be a twig-girl cousin of sorts to Paddyjack, standing half-hidden in the vines that covered the riverside wall of the old shoe factory on Church Street. The painting was an immense work called Church Street II: Bricks and Vines, and Izzy saw it as the centerpiece of the series, which she’d taken to calling Crowsea Touchstones. It was due to be hung at The Green Man in October.

Albina was excited about the show and all of Izzy’s friends loved the series, but the person whose opinion she really craved was Rushkin, so that was how their weekly visits to each other’s studios began.

She dropped by his studio at the beginning of May and, after a pleasant hour or so of conversation, invited him to come by her studio the next day to have a look at some of her new work.

Every time Izzy saw him, Rushkin couldn’t have been nicer. By the end of June, the faint niggle of anxiety she’d associated with him had entirely vanished. They never spoke of numena—nothing odd or strange or out of the normal world ever came up in their conversations at all. Instead they talked about art; Rushkin criticized, gently, and praised, lavishly. Izzy forgot John’s warnings, forgot Rushkin’s temper, forgot everything but the joy of creating and sharing that joy with an artist that she admired so much it was almost an infatuation.