Abbie finished, spun the cap back on the bottle and blew on her little toe. “What in the world got you to thinking about that?”
“The smell.”
“Well”—she waved the bottle in the air—“if you find yourself in need, you can get your own. I’m not letting you”—she twirled her index finger in the air, making a circular motion and pointing it in my general direction—“paint yourself, and then expect me to paint my toes with it. A girl’s got to have her boundaries. You’re on your own.”
“Can’t say that I blame you.”
23
Because of her travels, Abbie had seen some of the greatest art ever created. She’d stood right in front of it. Stared, laughed, cried. Hence, she understood it better and appreciated it on a level exponentially deeper than I did or could. While I might have understood the painters’ lives, Abbie understood their work, and in a greater sense, them. Compared to Abbie, I didn’t know squat. I’d be looking at an art book, turning the pages, and she’d say, “I’ve seen that,” or “It’s better in person,” or “Oh, honey, you should see that…the way the light travels across…” I was always jealous.
We’d been married a year when she came to me. I was sitting in my studio, mixing paints.
She sat in my lap, arm around my neck. “I want to go on a trip.”
“Okay.”
“And I want to plan it. All by myself.”
“Okay.”
“And you’ll go with me?”
“Sure.”
She walked out of the room, grabbed a folder that was about four inches thick and came back in. She sat on the floor, patted the ground next to her and then unfolded a map of the world.
One of the great things she’d gotten from her father was the ability to think outside the box. Add to that the fact that she had money and Abbie could come up with some “out there” ideas.
We were gone nearly a year.
In a perfect world, we’d have started with the early Renaissance and moved forward linearly, hopping through a timeline of artists and their work. Instead, we hopped geographically, from city to city. That is, until the very end. But that, too, she did on purpose.
Our first stop on our way to New York was the National Gallery in D.C. I remember turning a corner and there hung Rubens’s Daniel in the Lions’ Den. I sat on a bench opposite the work and walked across it with my eyes for nearly three hours. The idealized grandeur reached down within me and touched something I never knew was there.
At the Art Institute of Chicago, we sat with Toulouse-Lautrec and his At the Moulin Rouge. Toulouse was the crippled outcast who hung out in Paris bordellos with prostitutes and other social outcasts and found comfort in the night world of Paris. If Toulouse had taught me anything, it was that it takes an outcast to paint the needy.
In London, Abbie rushed me to the National Gallery where I met Giovanni Bellini and his Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan. The face, the expression of the mouth, the facial wrinkle in the cheek matched by the neck and, most importantly, the eyes. Nothing prepared me for that.
We flew to Florence and met Giotto. Giotto had taken the flat two-dimensional creations of his predecessors and, using light and dark shading, added dimension. He gave solidity and weight where it had not existed before. In her role as my tutor, Abbie asked me, “Why is he important?”
I could see now. “He thought outside the box.”
Second, she led me to Donatello’s sculpture Mary Magdalene—the aged woman, her anguish imprinted on her face. Her torment stopped me. The way her hair draped across her face, her torn clothes, she wore her emaciated, withered soul on the outside.
In the Uffizi Gallery, I found Piero della Francesca and his one-sided portrait of Federico da Montefeltro. Federico was disfigured in that he’d lost his right eye in a sword fight, so Francesca painted him in full profile but only of his left side—to hide it. Oddly enough, while his contemporaries were idealizing their subjects, he showed the moles and crooked nose. Also there was Titian’s Venus of Urbino. While her body is provocative, it is drawn in such a way that leads you time and time again to her face, the angle of her neck, the inviting drop of her shoulders, the playfulness in her eyes, the relaxed crossing of her legs. It’s what a nude should be.
Then she took me to Portrait of a Man (The Young Englishman). Whereas Bellini’s Doge is stiff and wooden, Titian’s Englishman is not, the youthful honesty of his face drips off the page. While his garment fades away, can even be described as washed out and nondescript, his gaze is almost verbal. He captures the viewer, pulls at your eyes and forces you to come to grips with the singular thought that his might just be the best portrait ever painted.
One afternoon, she wrapped a blindfold around my head and led me by the hand down a walkway, around a corner and sat me on a bench. I knew where we were. It’s rather a famous walk, but then she took off the blindfold. There he stood. Michelangelo’s David. I hit my knees. If there is anything perfect in art, that may be it. I cried. Cried like a baby.
Abbie knelt beside me. My tutor. “Why is he important?”
“He made his own box.”
Halfway through our trip, I realized that Abbie had lifted my masters off the page, taken them out of the realm of gods and set me at a table where they were carrying on a rather lively conversation. She introduced me to them and slid my chair up to the table. It was a gift unlike any other. In doing so, she took what head knowledge I had of each of them and allowed it to sift down into my heart. Where it would take root.
In Rome we found Bernini’s sculpture Damned Soul. It is the face of a tormented man facing eternal damnation. To get the face just right, Bernini scorched his forearm with a hot iron. It worked, because you can see the torment in the eye and cheek, the rise of the nose, the wild flaming hair—open mouth, wide eyes. I shook my head. How does he do that?
In Potsdam at the Neues Palais, I marveled with Caravaggio and his Doubting of St. Thomas. For so long I’d wanted to lean in close and study how the finger, up to the second knuckle, was stuck into the skin in Jesus’s rib cage. In Rome, we found Judith, and I met the servant with the wrinkled, serious face.
At the Louvre in Paris, I met Raphael’s Baldassare Cas-tiglione. He was the clear-eyed and pensive man I’d met twenty years before on a page in the library with my mom. For the first time, I understood how the introspectiveness of the philosopher is seen through the eyes, and how such a somber mood is created with stillness and “quiet” colors.
We met countless others, but she saved my favorite for last.
Rembrandt.
In an era when most who sat for portraits were posers, clothes horses, engaged in a costume drama where they believed their clothing identified them, along came Rembrandt. He didn’t think twice about accurately depicting a crow’s foot, a bulbous nose, the oversized scrotum of a chubby toddler, or Abraham’s huge hand on Isaac’s face—which we saw at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.
Rembrandt looked for what described a person, what identified them, and he did not avoid it or shy away from it. He sought to uncover the personality of the person before him by taking off the mask that either he wore by choice or that society had placed on him. His fine motor skills caught the precise textures of fabric, like perforations in lace or the translucent layering of chiffonlike fabric. He used high finish and rough scraping within the same area, scratching back white paint with the stub end of a brush. In A Portrait of an 83-Year-Old Woman in the National Gallery in London, he gave us the droop of an octogenarian eyelid, where the skin hanging loosely over her lid had been made with jabbing strokes of the brush. Her tortoise face, the wetness of her eyes, the way she looked past you—the shadows give thoughtfulness, and her pink eyelids suggest nights without sleep.
Nobody does eyes like Rembrandt.
With Rembrandt, there were no grotesques. His naturalism—which some would say was uncompromising—jumped off the canvas. He read people emotively and looked through the mask to find the individua
l. Whether through the arc of an eyebrow, the angle of a chin, the rise or fall of cheekbones, a once-broken nose or the folds of a jowl. He listened to the pull on his insides and what that told him about someone. He found that singular thing, painted it and gave you a reason to look, and look again. I could not take my eyes away. Up close and in person, I saw levels and layers to his painting that didn’t exist in any book. His craft did this, his technique, from finesse to broad strokes, his hand and brush were in perfect concert with his head, his imagination, and with this, he invited your sympathies. Even in something so simple as his Slaughtered Ox at the Louvre in Paris.
I had held it together until the end of the trip, but Rembrandt brought me to a crisis of confidence. Michelangelo would have, except that he’s…Michelangelo. Abbie knew this—that’s why she saved Rembrandt until last. I walked away from Rembrandt with a DNA-level desire to craft unedited human nature, in all its rumpled impurity.
Abbie tapped me on the shoulder. “And him?”
“Those people who sat for portraits…they didn’t pose. Motionless, yes; but they nonetheless moved. They lived.” I wanted to quit. To give up. Burn everything I’d ever done.
Abbie nodded. “What you see is human greatness. This is as good as it gets, as it’s ever been, maybe as it ever will be.” I saw what he’d done and I knew that I could not do that. Abbie wrapped her arm inside mind and said, “Come on, he’s just a man. You can do that.”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“You already do.”
“But…he’s Rembrandt.”
She nodded. “And you’re Doss.”
“You’re still nuts.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I believe.”
Our trip was an education unlike anything I’d ever known. It was as if Abbie knew my incompleteness. My deficiencies. To combat them, she mapped out a course filled with precisely the art I needed to take in, proving that she knew instinctively which works I needed to see to become the artist I could be. To become the artist she knew I could.
I remember leaving the hall where David stands. Walking out, we passed by all the friezes he created. Nothing but huge chunks of granite with these forms of half-people climbing out of the rocks. It’s like they’re breaking free. Escaping. And when I walk back down that hallway in my mind, I realize that Abbie had done that for me.
Abbie led me to her river, and I drank deeply.
We returned home and I discovered that Abbie had given me a gift I had not anticipated. I stood before my easel and found that I saw beauty in the not-so-beautiful, even in the grotesque. What she had birthed with Rosalia, she had now shaped and matured. I looked at the paints piled in a bucket at my feet. Where before I had seen a few dozen, now I saw ten thousand.
24
JUNE 4, MIDDAY
The same railroad that runs through Moniac, just twelve crow miles away, passes along the south side of St. George. The A.E. Bell Bridge spans the river at St. George and is a favorite canvas for lovers with spray paint. Purple martins nest beneath the bridge by the hundreds on their return trek north after spending the winter in Brazil. Seldom stopping to rest, they eat and drink while flying. Each one cuts the air above and below the bridge like an F-16 in search of their daily quota of horseflies, dragonflies or june beetles. Then they drop to the surface and cut the glassy water with their beaks.
Compared to Moniac, St. George is a thriving metropolis. Population might top a hundred. Grammar school, restaurant, gas station with grocery store and butcher, auto repair shop, a four-way stop marked by a flashing caution light and a burger joint called the Shack by the Track.
I cut the paddle, pulled against the stern and steered us toward the bank. We swung around the skeleton of an old wooden boat. The keel and a few stubborn ribs were all that remained. I helped her from the boat and led her around the spare tires and the ten thousand shards of green glass. Up north, people spray paint boxcars or the back of billboards. Down here, we paint water towers or the underside of bridges. Abbie walked amongst the concrete pilings and read aloud, “Pie says hie.” And, “Donna likes Robert.” She reached down and pulled a discarded can from the rocks. She shook and mashed her thumb against the stuck depressor. It sputtered then sprayed green. She walked to an empty piling, reached above her and began spraying: “Abbie loves Doss.”
She dropped the can to her feet. “You know, if you can’t say it with Krylon, then you just can’t say it.”
She stood beside me, hanging her arm inside mine. She whispered, “Remember the Guadalquivir?”
THE GUADALQUIVIR RIVER in Spain is famous for several reasons. Columbus sailed it, as did Cortés, and in 1992 the World’s Fair occurred on its banks. Huge, empty buildings—once the rave of the day that promised to attract tourists the world over—now sit empty, rotting and colored with mildew and cracked paint. A monument to stupidity. The river was rerouted years ago—sending it around Seville—but the stretch that remains is still very much in use. Because it’s long, straight and has no current, Olympic crew teams come from all over the world to train year-round. A bike path, three miles long and wide enough for cars, lines one side. It’s used by runners, bikers, skateboarders, rock climbers, fishermen, crapping ducks and kids shooting heroin. Abbie had brought me here. It was one more class in my education. We’d eaten tapas, drunk a bottle of vino just up from the Torre del Oro and needed a walk. It was getting dark and didn’t look like the safest of places. I grabbed her hand. “What are we doing down here?”
We’d spent the last few weeks walking through museums. I was about museumed out. A concrete wall borders most of the river, lit by yellow streetlights that throw odd shadows across the walls. Some portions of the wall are a couple stories high and most every square inch is covered in graffiti. Huge scenes, thirty and forty feet tall and just as wide, cover long stretches. She ducked beneath an overpass and pointed. “Not all art is found in museums.”
The drug culture seems to spur much of the content, as it’s violent and has something to do with sex, somebody shooting somebody or needles and shooting up. It was angry, ripe with pain and reminded me of something I had begun to forget: escape is one of the miracles of art.
Abbie knew intuitively what I needed when I needed it. We had walked the length of it twice.
I STEADIED HER and helped her sit next to a concrete piling where the smell of fresh paint hung in the air. I read her green note. “Yes, I remember.”
I really wanted a hot veggie plate from the Shack by the Track, but prudence kept us hidden beneath the bridge.
With a circling tailwind, we continued past long, winding, bleached beaches, strands of mimosa trees—their purplish-pink blooms tickling the air—dogwoods, green and lush, and scrub oaks that anchored everything.
We passed beneath another railroad trestle that smelled strongly of creosote and diesel fuel, and around self-named places like Catfish Lane, Pond Fork Holler, and UGA Beach. The beaches here were longer, some a hundred yards long and covered in deer tracks and driftwood.
To the east was Conner’s A-Maize-ing Acres—a pick-your-own farm that peddled to city slickers looking for that “farm experience.” They raised pumpkins, watermelon and corn. A submerged sign in the river read “Poultry Fertilizer.”
We passed Harris Creek, Johnson Cemetery and Dunn’s Creek before passing Toledo, which is near the midpoint between St. George and Boulogne.
We passed the signature red clay of Tompkins Landing, where trash bags cluttered the bank and a man in a bathing suit lay sprawled across the sand like a beached whale. Given the number of empty Bud Light bottles strewn around him, the lobster tinge of his skin and the snoring, he’d been there awhile. The river widens here to maybe one hundred feet across. Lily pads have sprouted on the slower moving, sunlit Georgia side. At the landing, want-to-be rappers sucked on ten-cent stogies leaning against the mangled tailgate of a muddy red Toyota pickup. Tattoos, lip piercings, thick gold chains, chrome-sided sunglasses and pants worn below th
eir buttocks seemed to be the local uniform. They paid me little notice and said nothing, so I pulled my hat down over my eyes and paddled quietly through.