Whatever happened to this backcourt spirit? When exactly did it leave me?
I had always wanted more than my parents’ life and its routineness, but I did not take my education seriously enough, and my Leaving Certificate showed only the barest of passes in English and history, ruining any aspirations I might have had to become a teacher. Still, I could not settle for a job in the Singer factory or the biscuit warehouse, as my father had ordained. The afterglow of painting prodded me awake at night, urged me to submit an application to the Glasgow School of Art, told me I could conquer anything if I just applied myself. At the admissions interview, the registrar studied my portfolio and said, ‘Your work is naïve. It leans too much towards abstraction for abstraction’s sake. But it has more intensity than one normally finds in a woman’s painting, and you are still very young. Of course, you won’t be trained in oils until third year—that ought to correct the bad habits you’ve developed.’ A week later, he wrote to offer me a scholarship: We truly hope you’ll accept, the letter signed off, as though I had other choices.
By October, I found myself in colour theory lectures, attending slideshows on the canon; in drawing classes, idly sketching vegetable arrangements; in cold studios, measuring the proportions of nude models against a 2B pencil. My parents’ tenement seemed so far away, and I feared that the ‘intensity’ of my work was being dulled—normalised—by too much refinement of technique. In fact, this attention I paid to the rudiments of drawing and the methods of the Old Masters only heightened my appetite for painting. I made discoveries in these classes that I did not expect: how to imply the mood of a body with a sweep of Conté crayon, how broader narratives could be revealed through compositional decisions. My backcourt spirit survived in all the paintings I made in this period, though my early tutors did not reward it.
It was in the mural department, under the tutelage of Henry Holden, that I began to thrive. I was inspired by the grand traditions of mural painting: from the ice-age pictures in the caves of Lascaux, to the mosaicked churches of Ravenna and Byzantium, the frescos of Giotto, Tintoretto, Michelangelo, Delacroix, and the great political gut-shots of Rivera. In Holden’s tutorials, I felt energised and unhindered. He was a rangy old socialist in half-moon glasses, who gave us curious monthly assignments: Devise a scene for the ballroom of the Titanic. (For this, I painted a ballet of furnace-room labourers in cloth caps, dancing with wheelbarrows of coal, and was marked down for ‘discounting context’.) Paint a scene depicting a work by Shakespeare as it relates to modern times. (For this, I created a swathe of Glasgow tenements with Juliets waiting at every window, graveyards full of Romeo headstones and wounded Mercutios in army uniforms. The picture was kept for the School’s collection, and subsequently lost.)
Holden was the finest teacher I ever had. To ‘avoid any earache’ from the external assessor, he steered us away from the influence of Picasso (‘talent like his can neither be taught nor replicated’), but he allowed us to eschew the mannered ways of easel painting that were sacrosanct to other tutors: the single-viewpoint rule, the vanishing point, chiaroscuro. A great mural, he used to say, was perpetually in conversation with its environment: it should not retreat into the background or vie for attention, but ought to span ‘that invisible line between’. When Holden talked, his words stayed with you. He would twist the tip of his ear while he admired a work-in-progress, as though turning off a valve, and he walked along the building’s topmost corridors racketing his cane against the radiators, or whistling Irving Berlin tunes. Sometimes, he came to drink with us at The State Bar, and would cradle the same small measure of whisky in a glass until closing time.
Holden’s least prescriptive brief came in the fourth year, prior to our diploma show. Complete a mural for a platform at Central Station. There were no limits on theme or materials, he told us. ‘It needn’t convey anything of the railway per se. But, of course, you should think about how the work will be slanted by its location, and vice versa. I want to see your imaginations taking you places. I also want you focusing them where they ought to be. Understand?’
For weeks, I failed to summon a single idea. I spent full days in the studio, numb and depleted, searching for a hint of something true, but any bright intentions I had soon floundered on the pages of my sketchbook. Anxieties began to overrule my normal instincts: what if the backcourt spirit was not enough to sustain me? What if I was never meant to listen to it in the first place? Then Holden came to rescue me. He edged into my workspace, saw the blankness of the canvas I had stretched upon the frame, and said, ‘What’s the matter, Ellie? Have you let the fight go out of you?’
That was exactly how I felt, and I told him so.
‘Then pick a different battle,’ he said. ‘Disturb the peace a bit.’
‘I don’t know how.’
Holden pondered my face, as though seeing it for the first time. ‘Remind me again: are you Catholic?’
‘My mother is.’
‘That wasn’t my question.’
‘Well, I suppose I still believe in God, but not in what the Bible says.’
‘There you are then. Paint what you believe.’
In the moment, his advice seemed so woolly and impractical that I felt even more adrift. Paint what you believe. He might as well have said, Paint the air. But when I got back to my little room-and-kitchen flat and tried to sleep, his words kept pinching at me, until I relented to their meaning. Holden was not telling me to reach inside myself for some pious motivation; he was inviting me to paint the world as I understood it, to convey my own perspective with conviction. The mural should be the picture I would hope to see if I were standing on that platform with my suitcase, waiting for a train to sidle in and carry me away. It should resonate with its location but also transcend it. It should be both personal and public.
I sketched until the light of early morning, making sense of my initial ideas in ink, and finishing with gouache on paper. The next day, Holden found me in the studio, adding a grid of construction lines to the completed image. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘you’ve finally picked a battle,’ and I did not see him again until the entire twelve-by-three-foot canvas was completed. At the diploma show, modest crowds formed around it. There was head-scratching and consternation. There was excitement. I felt the shift of my trajectory.
What the crowd saw that night was a depiction of an ordinary station platform. The grey-rendered steam of a locomotive swelled from the lower aspect of the canvas. In parts, I had thinned the whorls of paint to near translucence; in others, it cloyed like molasses, in level spots of oil and glaze that almost shone. Amidst the curls of smoke was a rolling horde of men in rags and bedraggled women holding babies. They were clambering from the west side of the platform, stumbling over each other in a tumult, falling headlong. And in the calm space to the east, where the grey mist was dispersing, a figure stood in a baggy pinstriped suit, his body turned, his face unseen, but slightly peering backwards. His right hand was stigmatised and held a crown of thorns. He was barefoot and his tawny hair was greased and combed. A trail of oats was spilling from the briefcase in his other hand. A Bible rested in his top pocket. Beyond him were sunlit pastures fenced off with barbed wire; ships already leaving port; the distant flatline of the sea. I called it Deputation.
The external assessor was so insulted by the picture that he did not deem it worthy of a passing grade. I had sensed that the mural would provoke strong opinions, but I did not expect that it would rouse such ill feeling that the School would deny my graduation. Whilst I was painting Deputation, I daydreamed of installing it at Central Station, imagining the railway manager being invited to the show, falling in love with it. I had taken the trouble of designing it so the canvas could be detached from its stretcher frames and affixed to the brickwork with lead paste, as many of the great muralists in America had been known to do. I had thought—vainly hoped—that it would help me acquire more commissions. Instead, the School gave me two options: repeat the fourth year, or leave withou
t a diploma. I preferred the idea of packing sewing-machine needles with my mother.
At the end of term, as the show was being pulled down, I went in to the studio to collect my things. Henry Holden called me to his office. I sat on his paint-smattered banquette while he rummaged the papers on his desk. There was a reek of whisky about him. ‘I’ve spoken again with the School governors,’ he said. ‘I wish I could say they’d changed their minds.’
‘I’m starting to think it’s for the best.’
He shook his head. ‘Rubbish. You submitted a wonderful painting, and I’m embarrassed those cowards aren’t supporting it. When you go off and make your fortune as a painter, they’re all going to look rather silly. Now—’ He lifted up a folder and gave it a cursory glance before tossing it aside. ‘You might not have seen this in the newspapers, or heard about it on the wireless, but—ah, here we are.’ He unfolded what looked like a grocer’s receipt, skim-reading it. ‘There’s a new travelling fellowship you can apply for.’
‘I really don’t think I’ll be—’
‘Shssh. Listen. This is good news.’ He paused, swallowing drily, and I realised that he was very drunk indeed. ‘Now, I should warn you, the endowment is not much, but it’s been decided, and the committee chairman—namely me—will be most upset if you don’t accept. In fact, he insists that you do. Here.’ He offered me the grocer’s receipt. A name was scrawled on the back in pencil—Jim Culvers—with a number and an address. ‘An old student of mine in London is looking for an assistant. If he doesn’t pay you well enough, give me a ring and I’ll lean on him. It’s not the same as a diploma, or even a proper fellowship, I know—but, anyway, those are his details.’
I felt as though I should kiss him. ‘You don’t have to do this for me, Henry.’
‘I’m aware.’
‘I don’t think I really deserve it.’
‘Then give it back, I’ll tear it up for you.’ He creaked forward on his chair, turning out his palm. I would always remember this moment with Holden, how he looked at me with certainty, knowing I would not release the paper to him. ‘Thought not,’ he said, and withdrew his hand. ‘It’ll take Jim a while to notice you’re a better painter than he is. When that happens, move on. Until then, I suspect the two of you will get on famously. He’s already expecting you.’
If I had chosen differently, and carried out my plan to take a factory job alongside my mother, I might never have painted again. But how much worse off would I have been to live without art than to have it consume me and spit out my bones? There are still days when I count up all the sewing-machine needles I could have packed instead.
There is no doubt that Fullerton’s arrival at Portmantle had some influence on my painting, but I cannot credit him for the discovery that mattered most. It was in the springtime—two whole seasons before he was admitted—that I took myself into the deepest woods in search of herons to draw, and found one perching on a rotten tree trunk swathed in mushrooms. I sat and sketched that splendid bird until it suddenly took off. I tried to keep track of it, gazing up through the branches, but it glided out of sight, and by then I was halfway out of the forest and the dinner bell was clanging at the mansion. It was only when I got back to my studio, after dusk, that I realised I had left my sketchbook somewhere in the trees—most of the drawings it contained were not worth saving, but I felt the heron sketches had potential and I did not want to lose them. So I got a torch and went back into the woods. That night, the dark was full and thick; the firmament of stars was at its clearest. There was a waxing crescent moon and the yellow-white shimmer of the neighbouring islands seemed closer than ever. I hurried through the pines by torchlight, hunting for the spot where I had found the heron, but everything looked different in the dark. My foot caught in the scrub and I tripped over. The torch spat out its batteries as it hit the ground. For a moment, there was terrifying blackness and I thought I had passed out. But then I saw the most unusual thing ahead of me: a spread of pale blue light, like the haze of a gas flame.
I lifted myself up and moved towards the glow. It was coming from a clutch of fallen trees not far away. As I got closer, the blue intensified: a curious shade, vivid yet lucent, like the antiseptic liquid barbers keep their combs in, or the glaucous sheen on a plum. It did not emanate from the trees themselves, but rather from a substance they were covered in: luminescent mushrooms the size of oyster shells. Their caps had pale blue halos that, when packed into dense clusters as they were, gave off a gleam so bright I could make out all the textures of the forest floor, insects crawling in the mulch, my sketchbook lying on the ground—I no longer cared to pick it up. There was a slow, electric crackle in my blood, a feeling I had not known in years. Not quite clarity, just the tingle of it surfacing. An idea. A glimpse of home. The rest, I knew, was up to me.
By the winter of the boy’s appearance, I was still learning the nuances of the pigment, sampling its versatility. Some inconsistencies had to be corrected in the mixture before I could commit to painting with it; the production methods needed more refinement, and I had lingering concerns about permanence and lightfastness. But my excitement for the material could not be dampened. Quickman always said the best ideas ‘invade your heart’. This one had become a romance.
It was not a difficult pigment to make, though it required considerable patience and commitment. I established a simple routine: working through the darkness until breakfast, sleeping until lunch, resting until dinner, resuming after dusk. I lived this way throughout the summer, finding respite in the cool of nightfall, hiding from the glare of daylight. I persisted through the muggy autumn evenings, the early rains, the frost, the sudden snow. But when the boy arrived, it knocked me off my rhythm. I allowed his presence to divert me from my purpose much too readily. His sparring with Quickman at the backgammon board was just the first instance of this distraction—their game dragged on much longer than expected and I did not even think to put a stop to it, just let the two of them battle it out, paying no mind to the delay it caused my work. It may have only set me back a fraction, but a fraction was too much.
As soon as they were gone, I went about the drudgery of organising my studio. There was a long night of sampling ahead of me and I had not rested much since lunchtime. I closed my shutters, rolled down my blinds and stapled them to the frame. I brought out the mortar and pestle, the stone muller and the mixing slab, wiping down my workbench and dragging it into position. I prepared another fifty canvas squares. I cleaned my sable brushes. Then I put on my coat and satchel, laced up my boots, and waited for the last few lights to blink off at the mansion. Lanterns glared for a while in the portico until Ender came to snuff them out, and then a perfect darkness settled all about the refuge.
I was mindful not to switch on my torch until I was safely through the apron of the pines. The route had become so familiar that I no longer had to look for the notches I had carved into the tree trunks to get my bearings; but I walked slowly, cautiously, knowing that if I went too far I would emerge onto a rocky escarpment and be confronted by the open sea. (I could not face the sea at night-time because I was afraid of it, ebbing and heaving in the blackness, as though it had some secret mission.)
It seemed I was the only person at the refuge who knew what could be found in its deepest woods at night. I often feared another resident would see me in the trees and make me explain myself, so I went about my work quite furtively. When the air became dank and the ground turned spongy underfoot, I could tell that I was close. I was looking for an enclave where the pines stood at a slant. Another twenty paces and I saw the trunks begin to lean, until I came to a small clearing—a kind of bald patch in the woods—where several trees were rotting sidelong on the mulch. I shut off my torch and let the miracle reveal itself.
Pale blue mushrooms, glimmering like stars.
I had learned, through trial and error, to harvest only what I needed. The fungus was fast-growing and it replenished quickly, but the best fruitheads were the oldest—thos
e big-eared clusters that were left to fatten on the bark. From my satchel, I got out my knife and the tin foil. My joints cricked as I knelt in the dirt, reaching out with the blade. One clean motion of the knife was all it took, running it against the bark until the gleaming fruitheads fell into my palm. Too slow, and the mushrooms would crumble as I sliced them. Too rough, and they would lose their colour. I cut off twelve of the fattest and laid them on a sheet of foil, enfolded them tightly, and stowed the whole lot inside my satchel.
No light could be allowed to creep into my studio while I was sampling, so the first thing I did when I got back was shut the door and seal its frame with duct tape. Next, I extinguished my stove and turned off the overhead fluorescents.
There was a total darkness in the room for half a breath, and then my wall of samples bloomed with light. A stroke of blue appeared on every square of canvas, but no two were alike. Some of the swatches had a strong, unwavering glow—a blue almost as rich as the live fungus itself. Others were dilute and faltering—a Star of Bombay colour. There was dullness where the paint had been applied too thickly or the pigment was too granulated, and glassiness where it had been oiled too heavily. That same blue was now spewing from the joins of my satchel, and I could not afford to let it die.
I had tried so many different variations of the process with changeable results: (i) applying the powdered fungus as an essence to ready-made oil paints; (ii) boiling down the mushrooms, adding gum arabic to the run-off to make briquettes of watercolour; (iii) mixing the ground fungus with glycerine, honey and water, oxgall and dextrin powder, to make a gouache; (iv) breaking egg yolks into the powdered fungus to make tempera, and so on. The facilities at Portmantle were such that I could call upon as many materials as I needed, and if there was anything that Ender could not provide for me from the supply stores, the provost would order it to be shipped from the mainland. In any case, the method that produced the brightest pigment required only the most basic equipment.
The Ecliptic Page 5
