Eileen and True Hunger

by Michael Casey



  Eileen and True Hunger

  by Michael G Casey

  Copyright 2012 Michael G Casey

  EILEEN AND TRUE HUNGER

  The apple had given Eileen a lot of trouble. At first she’d tried a sap green but it was too lemony somehow. She added a tad of Alizarin crimson but that muddied the mixture. She tried to lighten the tone with Titanium white but that gave an unwanted beige hue.

  “You’ve forgotten all your colour theory,” the teacher said. A young pup, her mother would have called him, a whelp. With his grandfather shirt, designer stubble and hiking boots. Her mother had been contemptuous of men in general and especially hard on any man Eileen had brought home. But the teacher knew his stuff. She had to give him that.

  “And this .... what’s this ...?” He pointed at, and resiled from, the easel at the same time.

  “It’s a highlight,” she said uncertainly, conscious of the fact that the other students, though painting away, were listening keenly. Her voice seemed to soar above the soft sounds of brushes and breathing.

  “It’s not a highlight. It’s a splodge of mixing white stuck on like a stamp. Look at the light on the apple. Look ...” He almost pushed her towards the still life. “What do you see?”

  “Well .... the light reflected on the skin of ....”

  “Is it warm or cold, Eileen?”

  “Cold”. Light had to be cold, she thought, especially neon light. That curious woman, Helen somebody, from a neighbouring easel came over to inspect and to earwig.

  “You’re assuming it’s cold”, he said. “You’re working from prior beliefs ...”

  “But it’s neon light ....”

  “It’s halogen actually,” Helen corrected her.

  “That’s not the point,” he said. You must look. Learn to look. It’s warm. Can’t you see the glow?”

  She stood back, squinted, then nodded slowly. Damn it to hell; it was warm.

  “And the front part of the apple. What colour do you see?

  “Green.” What else could it be?

  “Another assumption, Eileen. Can’t you see the tint reflected from the orange?”

  “Now that you mention it ...”

  “OK.” He seemed satisfied by her contrite tone and moved on to the next easel, leaving her to her own devices.

  She just could not get it right. The apple remained like a flat green disk. It had no rotundity or substance. And the indentation for the stalk seemed like a bruise or a stain. The acrylics didn’t blend well together and her hog’s hair brush was moulting. God, she was blaming the tools now. She abandoned the apple for a while and worked on the orange. The pineapple was too challenging by far, given the state of her morale. Not much more than ten years away from retirement, she hoped she might have a talent for painting; a small talent would do. Her flat was at ground level and she had images of herself painting away in the relative privacy of the small garden during the lonely years that lay ahead. The other tenants would probably stop and stare but she wouldn’t be too intimidated by that, not if she had some ability.

  The orange didn’t go that well either. She didn’t know how to capture the pitted surface of the skin and the thousand pin-pricks of highlight as if the fruit was sweating through its pores. As well as that the apple also reciprocated the favour of reflection; casting some of its damn green onto the orange.

  She began to panic. The teacher was already half-way around the circle of easels and would be back to her soon. It was ridiculous. An adult class and she was acting like a schoolgirl. And the supercilious twit of a teacher .... she could have been his mother .... well, older sister anyway. She heard him say to another student.

  “Good work. You’re got the mid-tones right. Remember, painting is about tone, not colour.” He went on in vaguer terms about painting the volumes of the objects from the inside.

  Eileen returned to the apple but couldn’t master it. She now knew what she wanted to do but seemed to lack the skill, or possibly confidence to do it. She concentrated on the shaded side of the fruit, using raw umber.

  He was at her elbow again.

  “That shaded area is not the darkest. You have at least three other areas which are darker. Have you forgotten the chiaroscuro exercise we did three weeks ago?”

  “No .... I remember it.” She tapped the handle of the brush against her teeth.

  “And look, the pigment is wrong. What are you using? Umber?”

  “Yes .... maybe I should try a darker green?

  “No, no, no. The complementary colour. What is the complementary colour of green?”

  “Red.” She remembered that much.

  “Exactly.”

  “But I can hardly use red .... for the shaded area of a green apple.” She was right to be more assertive towards this Bohemian pipsqueak. But then she ruined it by adding, “It’s a Granny Smith ....”

  “Not a primary red, of course not, but a hint of red. Try mixing cadmium into the umber.” He peered more closely at the canvas. In a way she was encouraged that he bothered booking at all. Her morale was so low she half expected him to ignore her work completely as if it was too poor to bother with. He pointed again towards the triangle of dark shadow between apple and table. “Yes, that’s your deepest tone. Use it as a marker.”

  Her neighbour, who had sauntered over again, concurred, “The other tones should relate to that one.” She leant back on her heels to appraise Eileen’s efforts. “It’s a brave attempt all the same.”

  Eileen’s teeth ached. This from a woman who normally gushed some inanity like, “Oh, it’s so beauootiful” or “Oh, I wish I had your sense of colour.” She was clearly out to impress the teacher with her condescending remark. Eileen suddenly knew what her teenage nephew meant when he told his brother to get out of his face.

  The teacher had been looking at the palette and now dipped a forefinger into a blob of paint. With a few deft strokes of his finger he did more for the apple than she had done with her sable and bristle brushes over two three-hour sessions. In fact the finger-painted apple seemed to come forward from the background; it almost bulged.

  “My goodness. That’s miraculous,” Helen said in a gush of breath.

  Despite her feeling of shame, Eileen could not disagree. The pipsqueak had talent, even in his fucking fingers.

  “Now,” he said, stepping back, “that’s your base. Build on that.”

  “Thank you”, she grated as he moved to Helen’s easel. She was afraid to touch the apple now in case she ruined what he had done. She consulted her watch, hoping the class would end before he circled back. She could work on it at home and maybe earn some approbation next week. Words floated over to her from Helen’s easel.

  “What about perspective, Helen? You have at least two vanishing points here ...Can’t you see?”

  Eileen smiled grimly and resisted the temptation to stroll over and savour her neighbour’s deflation.

  At the end of the class they followed the usual drill of turning their easels around and congregating in the centre of the circle so as to view the work of all the students. The teacher gave a brief critique of each canvas to the whole class and Eileen dreaded the moment he came to hers. She didn’t have to worry, however, because he ignored her canvas and that was worse!

  A couple of days later when she got home from work she set up the fruit on the kitchen table and arranged a lamp to simulate the light and shade. There was something different about the apple, a sort of shiny meniscus floating on the skin. She started to mix paint on the disposable grease-proof palette and kept correcting and over-correcting until she had a whole mound of paint – far more than she needed.

  She was just about ready to apply the paint when she noticed something else.
The apple was becoming over-ripe. There was a faint ochre tinge in the skin that hadn’t been there before. This was the last straw. Just as she got the colour right the damn fruit changed.

  She looked from the object to the large clot of useless paint on the palette. It was too much. With barely a thought, she reached over, grabbed the apple and took a bite out of it. Then, methodically, she began to eat the rest of the still life, including the pineapple which she cut into chunks.