“Art isn’t reproducing visual facts. It’s the difference between perception”—he pointed with the brush to her painting—“and conception.” He tipped his head toward his own. “Once you learn that, you’ll never paint the same again.”
• • •
Each week she felt more comfortable painting patches of contrasting color, and hues not in the natural scene. Each weekend when Alice came from Paris, Emily showed her something she was pleased with.
Late one morning in her room, Gibb held the bowl of his pipe and pointed to her canvas with the mouthpiece. “See how you’ve given contour to the hill by color, that yellow ochre next to that lime green? This is good work. When it dries, let me have it for a while. And yesterday’s too.”
“Why?”
“I have someone I want to show them to. Don’t worry. You’ll get them back. I think you’ll be a fine woman painter someday.”
• • •
When he left, she set to work stretching canvases, the only thing she felt like doing. Hammering. That good solid whap when she hit one dead center. Woman painter! She scowled at a tack she was holding in place, hammered at it and smashed her thumb.
Alice burst into her room with her small carpetbag.
“It just gets my goat,” Emily muttered. “Gibb said I’ll be a fine woman painter someday. Might as well say, ‘Fine work for a child. Or a monkey.’ ” She sucked on her thumb. “Haven’t you noticed that he always has to smash a little spunk out of me?”
“Haven’t you noticed that there’s more to life than art?” Alice’s voice trembled. Her face was blotched.
“What’s wrong?”
“Haven’t you noticed it’s not the weekend and I’m here?”
Emily put down the hammer. “What happened?”
“A telegram came.”
“Not another of Dede’s ‘come home immediately’ demands.” Emily drove in a tack in one wallop.
“No!” Alice shrieked. “It’s from Lizzie. Dede passed on.”
“Died?” It wasn’t possible. Her throat swelled shut. She enfolded Alice with both arms, small against her chest, and tried to absorb her spasms. Alice’s tears wet both of their cheeks.
“How?”
Alice collapsed onto the bed and handed her the telegram. Meningitis. Eight days and she was gone. Slipped away when Lizzie went out to make her tea. Lizzie would blame herself for not being there at the very last. The print swam. Dede loved her tea. She called it her cup of you-and-me, the Cockney slang. Emily rocked with Alice in her arms, crooning to her.
Dede dead. She’d hardly had a chance to live. Hosted a few Ladies’ Aid meetings, helped the orphanage society, and kept the house, cooking for them all those years. Was that all there was to it? That easy to let it slip by? Fast as a blink. Fifty-five years. Older than Mother was when she died.
“I can’t believe it.” Some thought shook Alice with new sobs and Emily held her tighter, her thumb throbbing against Alice’s shoulder.
“Remember how Dede took old ladies on buggy rides in the country wrapping them up in blankets?” Alice said. “For their health, she used to say, when it was really that she loved the ride.”
“Those buggy rides were the times I liked being with her.”
“It’s like part of myself gone, like she’s been stolen out of the house,” Alice said.
“No. The mark she left on us will always be there.”
She saw Dede in her seated tin soldier position the day she announced she was going to France, the thin bones of Dede’s hands rising and falling as she drummed her fingers on the arm of the chesterfield, muttering that Paris was infected with Bohemians. The energy it took to control her disapproval of most of the real world had sapped her of vitality, kept her brittle. Emily had understood then, watching Dede’s fingers, the truth hidden under Dede’s lethal dose of protection—fear that her unruly sister would get something rich and foreign and dangerous out of life that Dede would shrink from, wouldn’t have time for among her good works.
She let go of Alice’s shoulder and saw that her gaze was unfocused. “Even though Dede was such a stick, she meant well,” Alice said, sniffling.
“Working out her frustrations by scrubbing me raw in the bathtub.”
Alice snickered. “Because you needed it when you were smeared with cow-yard muck.”
“But she didn’t have to whack me with the dipper handle when I squirmed.”
“You didn’t just squirm. You scratched her. Be a little compassionate. She was only trying to raise us properly after Mother died.”
“And now that she’s dead too, you make her into a saint? She didn’t have to raise me with the riding crop. Compassionate! When I think of all those times she whipped me with it, how can I be?”
Alice winced at the memory.
“What hurt even more was when she had the police shoot Molly when I was away. Until Billy, I’d never had a dog so sweet-natured. What kind of a sister would do that?”
“Molly bit someone.”
“Barely. A puppy’s mistake. Dede was vindictive, Alice. You can’t deny it.”
Alice’s eyes flooded.
Emily held her again and rocked. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you cry. It’s just that life went crooked when Mother died and Dede took over with no one to stop her.”
Eventually Alice calmed and finished her tea. “Lizzie there all by herself. She’s had to do it all.” Alice tapped the empty envelope against her palm. “I’ve booked passage for us out of London on Saturday. It’s the soonest I thought we could manage.”
“We?”
She caught sight of the blank canvas she was going to use for a canal bridge showing the water’s many colors. To give up splintered light off water just when she was beginning to grasp how to make it vibrate, to leave before she learned some elusive painting truth—that would be Dede’s triumph from the grave.
She rested her hand on Alice’s sleeve, and noticed that her thumb had developed a blood blister. Alizarin crimson. So sudden. Fast as a blink.
“Will you be all right if you go home by yourself?”
Alice fingered a pile of stretcher tacks.
“It’s more important for me to stay,” Emily said.
Alice reached for the telegram and put it in the envelope and the envelope in her pocketbook, snapping it quietly.
“Then stay.”
17: Gibb
“Harry’s been detained in Paris,” Gibb’s wife Bridget said.
“Detained,” Emily said with an edge to the word. Spring in Crécy had flown by. Now she didn’t want to waste time waiting for him here in St. Efflam on the coast of Brittany. She counted out the francs for the summer session. Expensive but worth it.
With a playful smile, Bridget added, “He wants you to do five local subjects so he can critique new work as soon as he arrives.” Her smile became conspiratorial. “He assigned the other students only two. Of all of them, he talks about you the most.”
“Humph. When’s he coming?”
“Saturday.”
“Five in one week! I’d have to slapdash them to get five.”
Bridget patted Emily’s cheek. “Maybe that’s the point.”
• • •
In the morning, Emily followed a hedge between wheat and corn fields to a cliff. The rumble of waves and the kleeuw, kleeuw of gulls sounded like the beach at Sophie’s house. She’d paint right here so she could listen to them. She turned to face the high, open countryside and made a composition of two farmers in yellow straw hats mending a plow in front of a stone farmhouse. The next day, the patchwork fields drenched in golds and greens liberated her to use the brilliant Fauve palette. If she could have painted the smell of heather, she’d have splashed that on too. Later, a milkmaid with scratched legs switching her black and white cow held still for her. An old church, pared down to its peaked roof, arched doorway, and stubby dome, was the first painting she showed Gibb.
“Good. You’re more assertive wit
h form on that church, like Cézanne,” Gibb said when he saw it. “You’re taking risks with unnatural color. Clumsy, but it has energy. That is to say, it has soul.”
“How do I get rid of the clumsiness?”
He looked at her blankly. “Work.”
• • •
“Bonjour, madame,” Emily sang out every day to a stout peasant who greeted her from her garden. One Sunday when Emily passed by, the woman patted her chest and said, “Héloïse.” She was wearing a wide white headdress with starched wings. Emily pointed to it and held up a paintbrush. Héloïse’s face turned rosy, her hands flitted like butterflies, and she brought out her knitting and a chair. She struck a stiff pose and her expression turned serious, as if that were a requirement for High Art. Emily smiled.
Eventually, Héloïse waved her inside for biscuits and milk. She looked so absolutely right in her maroon skirt and long apron stirring soup in an iron kettle hanging in the stone fireplace. Only a few simple objects surrounded her—crocks and ladle, oil lamp, basket, two rush-bottomed chairs. It was as sparse as Sophie’s house. In the dim room, Emily contemplated shapes—from butter churn to broom to bellows. Simple geometric forms—ovals, half rounds, columns, trapezoids—that’s all they were. Héloïse herself was an egg shape suspended over a bulging rectangle. She took out her sketch pad. Héloïse smiled and chatted gaily as though Emily could understand.
When she finished, she hugged Héloïse and walked through the rectangle of light past two leafy spheres and a green cone. Before her a pale sienna strip narrowed in the distance, lined by white rectangles. The sensation was eerie. Where there had been hayricks when she walked into Héloïse’s cottage, now there were giant ochre blocks. Near them stood three connected trapezoids with defined planes, on four angled cylinders in Vandyke brown. It might be a horse. It didn’t matter what it was. It was more interesting as shapes and planes. On the way home, shapes and planes overwhelmed her as the only reality. She breathed hard. This she could use to paint totems.
A summer thunderstorm kept her indoors the next day, so she reworked her Alert Bay watercolors, simplifying to geometric shapes and exaggerating. For three rainy days she didn’t stop painting in her room, transforming her native subjects. On the fourth, Gibb came to her door under a torn umbrella. She pulled him inside and laid out a display of new work and old.
“You’re getting it,” he said.
“Getting what?” She always had to pull it out of him.
“The difference between objects as you see them in the world and their shapes transferred to flat surface.”
“And the handling of unblended pigment?”
“That too.” He looked at the one of Héloïse and almost smiled. “Gauguin painted those same Breton headdresses.”
“What about the native subject matter?”
“Entirely appropriate for you, with not a little aesthetic interest.”
“Not a little? How much is that?”
“Some Paris dealers show African sculpture. Picasso painted in African motif and Gauguin owes much to primitive art.”
“Do you think I can sell paintings of native motifs?”
“Maybe someday, but not until you paint them out of a deeper experience, with ideas out of your soul.”
“I thought I was. You even told me. Soul is energy.”
He wrinkled his lips. “That’s not all it is. It’s personal expression.” With one hand he gestured to Chief Wakias’s Raven’s beak. With the other, Héloïse’s cottage. “Which one has it?”
“Both!”
He shook his head and left.
She fumed the rest of the afternoon, paced in her room, compared both paintings for soul, couldn’t decide which one had it, and felt like kicking herself for not making Gibb explain. She couldn’t paint in such confusion, so she wrote to Jessica.
July 12, 1911
I may be a simpering provincial here, but oh what I’m learning! These new, joyous ways of painting blow the top of my head off some days. Other days, my flop fears paralyze me. My teacher says I’ve got to paint ideas out of my soul. He says he doesn’t see it in my work. But it isn’t a see. It’s a feel—the way the forest seeps into my innards, or wind who-whoo’s through pines, or totem eyes stare back. Oh, how I miss it. I have heaps to tell you when I get home. Thanks for prodding me to come.
Your old fusspot, Emily
In the morning, she got out of bed and lifted the curtain. The ground was puddled, but dry enough for her to work. What was she to do but to start again and show him? She trudged out of the village in galoshes.
The world crackled with after-a-rain brilliance. She set up her easel and stool, loaded her brush, one side with Naples yellow, the other with raw sienna, and quickly dashed off the rolling wheat field without even charcoaling it in first.
Breezes rippled the wheat like thousands of fluid paintbrushes upright and swaying, painting the air. That was an idea out of her soul. Brushes. When she’d gotten her first ones she’d marveled at their magic compared to colored pencils. A thin line trailed out if she held her brush so it barely touched the paper, thicker with more pressure. Dampened in green pigment, the brush could, with a flick of her wrist, suggest a leaf.
Now, in the distance, she let a flick of her wrist suggest a hayrick and peasants.
She remembered placing in her father’s big hand a drawing of the family dog. He gave it a glance, said, “Hm,” and went back to reading his paper. But on her seventh birthday, under a card in Father’s broad handwriting, To Millie, who sees glory in dogs and birds and cow yards, there they were, eight rectangular cakes of pigment and three slim yellow brushes.
In a gush of gratitude, she painted out the farmers and painted in a man dressed in pale raw sienna in the mid-ground. She put a shape in his hand. It could be a box. A paintbox even.
When Father planted the seed, he hadn’t foreseen that he’d later feel compelled to kill it. She could hear the scorn in his voice years later when he said, It’s one thing for a child to paint pretty pictures. It’s quite another for a grown woman to take such amusements seriously. He was afraid it would make her unmarriageable. He didn’t care about what she wanted. She changed his clothing to violet and Payne’s gray, his face to lime green and yellow ochre. She layered color after color, building up a thick impasto, her hand flying, the colors coming from some inward place.
It was an experiment in painting without a preconceived plan, in moving elements around, in letting colors show her emotions. It was an experiment, and she ruined it. It wasn’t soul. It was anger. She hadn’t defined her feelings about the figure so it was unconvincing in shape and muddy in color. She dreaded some sharp comment about her foolishness from Gibb.
“It’s going into the dustbin,” she told him the next day.
“You’re willing to risk your best to learn something better. That’s why you’ll be a fine painter someday—woman painter.”
“Why can’t you just say painter?”
A sound, not a word, came out of his mouth. His eyes looked like those of a small cornered animal. She didn’t really want to hear what he’d say.
“Why don’t you show me your work? Or other students’ work?”
“They don’t know what they’re after. You do.”
“I think I’m getting stale. I’ve learned tremendous lessons from you, and I’m grateful, but maybe I’ve painted with you long enough.”
His eyebrow twisted into the same curve as his lips. He tapped a brush against his wrist and gazed at her work. “D’accord. A New Zealand woman, Frances Hodgkins, is teaching at Concarneau, a port south of here. I’ll write to her today. Give me your home address for me to ship those paintings.”
The clarity that they were parting dawned on both of them at the same instant. She felt a cord unraveling between them. For once he looked directly at her, his eyes watery wounds.
“Remember when you get home, critics’ insults are medals of honor. Stay away from art jargon, Emily, and learn from y
our silent Indian.”
She repeated it to herself, word for word.
“One more thing. Very important. See the Salon d’Automne at the Grand Palais. All your progress will become clear.” He thrust his head forward, his eyes intense. “Promise me.”
He reached out his hand as if to grasp her arm, to touch her to make her know the importance of what he was saying.
She held her breath and thought, Yes, touch me.
His hand, blue paint under his thumbnail, stayed suspended in midair.
“I promise.”
18: Frances
Emily ran her fingers through her hair to tame it before she knocked. A woman answered. She was about her age, maybe older, nearly as stout. She wore an orange blouse, dark blue skirt, and black beret with a bold brass buckle at the front. Emily introduced herself.
The woman flung wide the door. “I expected you yesterday. Come in. I’m Frances.”
Emily entered a small cluttered room and found clothes hanging on easels, dishes piled on sketchbooks, jars of brushes on windowsills, every inch of wall space filled with vivid color. Instantly she felt at home.
“It took a day for me to find a room to rent. This town’s packed with visitors.”
“Always is in August.” Frances tossed her hat onto the bed, flumped into a sagging wicker armchair, and unlaced her shoes. “Whew! I just came in. Squeezed every drop of the day at both ends behind an easel. My feet are throbbing, but what glorious light.”
“Harry Gibb said you might have space for another student.”
Frances crossed her ankle over her knee to rub her arch. “He ought to have known. My summer classes are finished. I’m not taking students now. If you teach all the time, you can’t paint.”
Emily groaned.
“So, in that portfolio you have something to show for yourself?”
Emily pulled out everything, the recent St. Efflam scenes on top.