by K.Z. Freeman
The Painter
The Painter
Copyright © 2013 K.Z. Freeman
Image Copyright © by Jarek Kubicki
All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 9781301013210
https://www.kzfreeman.blogspot.com
1
In the deep forests of my hometown in southern Slovenia, in a clearing where no road leads to and animals avoid, there sits a tranquil lake. The area around it is boggy even in the warmest of summer days, yet no frogs have I ever found there and not a sound can be heard in that part of muddy earth. You can’t see the lake from above or any of the nearby hills. The trees leading to the place are many and a fog always hangs there, obscuring view and drifting as though governed by a current belonging to no wind from any point of the compass.
To find this body of water you have to follow the slow thinning of trees and stumble between the rotting bark and leaves and winding roots, until you reach a point where, step by step, the murky water rises up to your knees. The dead moss and lichen become sand as you wade through the cold and motionless transparency to a place where nothing grows and hasn’t done so for who knows how long.
Mud froths outs between your toes with every step, spreading in all directions as the water becomes clear enough for the small lake to be both beautiful and profoundly frightening. For when you reach its bank, you see just how steeply it drops into the black depths no eye can peer into. A prevailing sense of the place being old beyond man and memory awaits there, even though there is nothing to confirm this to be the case.
The lake is full of contradictions like this. It sounds calm and welcoming, yet beckons you gone once you reach that edge and hear a subterranean rumble of grinding stone and see the minute shaking of the otherwise deceptively calm surface. You see the sky above it contrasted by the dark below as you stand on the precipice. There is a gentle breeze spinning the mist into a circle while you wander to that edge, yet one feels no wind once the sheer drop is reached. The only smell is that of the woodland.
I believe it was here I once died.
I don’t know how it happened and can only further guess as to how I found the lake in the first place. I seem to remember a figure leading me to it, but I don’t recall that form or see it clearly, neither do I remember much else. I sometimes see myself walking its shore in dreams.
I remember how drenched I had been that night, lost in the nearby wood with no recollection of how I got there. I waited until morning, lest I become lost in the acres of forest. I didn’t get any sleep.
With eyes closed I can still see something from inside the lake, a presence, but I am no longer sure if it’s a thing I have later dreamed of, or something which had actually happened. But that sense of dying never left me.
I have not been to the lake since.
Yet it is all I can think about of late. Its influence is evident in all my works. It remains all I can paint and all I can dream about. I wish to go back there and, at the same time, dread to see it again. The memory of it fills me with horror I can scarcely describe, save on canvass. And that I cannot recall why I fear it makes the sense of terror all the more deep and singular.
For a moment, I think about the dream I had of it last night, when a voice refocuses my attention and I muster my resolve to continue the task at hand.
I hold the brush lazily in my hand, ready for the final stroke on my painting. It’s not a masterpiece by any means, but it will do.
The lighting in my studio is sepulchral, the sickly bulb above me so faint I can barely distinguish one shade of colour from the other upon the canvass before me.
“Is it done?” she asks from the dark where I can just make out the lines of her shape.
“Nearly, my dear,” I smile back.
She is of an impatient sort and knows what “nearly” means. She rises from her chair and hits the switch, then walks over to examine the painting. The wooden tiles creak beneath her feet.
Light reveals a spacious room. It is a disorganized mess of half-finished works and empty canvases propped against walls with cans on the floor, some of which lie spilled, some still unopened. Over all there hangs a smell as though someone had been painting the walls.
I crack a smile while her face twists into a sneer as she sees what I had made of what was supposed to be her portrait.
I had painted it on a dare.
“Do you still love me?” she had asked me earlier in the day.
“Of course I do,” I said. “I dream of you. I could paint your face in the dark,” I boasted.
Watching her stare at it, I cannot tell if she likes the painting or not.
“It’s there again,” she remarks. “But at least you’ve painted something else than the lake.”
“You don’t like it?” I ask.
“I didn’t say that,” she says with the faintest tone of admiration. “But it’s there again.”
“You’re an inspiration to me, you know,” I tell her. But she doesn’t believe me. How could she, when all I paint is the damn body of water in the woods?
I can easily say my work is not the finest. However the paintings seemed to have struck enough of a cord of peculiarity for people to buy some of them. The buyers are mostly strange men who fill me with a sense that my works mean more to them than they do to me. Which is just as well, now if only my dear wife could see it that way. She hates the paintings. She of course won’t tell me as much, but I can hardly blame her. I never use pleasant colours or depict images of gladness. Instead there’s always a suggestive composition of some distant and unnameable horror which cannot be painted, yet is always related to the viewer through some inner alchemy upon beholding the canvass.
There’s a peculiarity in all my works. My wife had pointed out the existence of it yet again, as it has managed to show itself even while I drew a portrait of her exquisite face. It is an entity of unknown purpose. It always steals its way into my splashes of colour. I can never remember painting the figure into my images, making it feel almost as though it happens between the strokes of my brush. It’s not really a figure though, but an outline of one, a shadowy silhouette of a hunched or bowed... someone. And it scares the living shit out of me.
“I bet if I could see your face while you paint,” she says, “I could tell when you’re painting that thing.”
“We can try again, if you want,” I tell her. “This time in the light.”
She agrees and we take an empty canvass to replace the one already on the rack. I leave the main light on and soon feel my mind aching and struggling to relate all of its contents over the white empty space before me. I find my wanderings in the light estranged to me and notice myself becoming focused more on the sight and less on the feel of the scene. Each stroke seems more clinical and real, depicting with increased detail what I see. I notice an abandon of my usual style of a somewhat undimensioned reality, and my ethereal abstractions get replaced by a meticulous attention to detail.
I paint every strand of Maya’s hair, depict every dimple and all the subtleties of her loveliness, while her eyes are painted with a more tangible nature to them. Even the fact that one of her eyelids remains always more open than the other is painted, a special fact she dislikes about herself but one I had always loved. I look into those blue orbs for a while and suddenly notice they have shifted and are now standing before me. She is shaking me by the shoulders. I’m still holding the brush – it leaves behind dark red strokes over the unfinished piece.
I blink. I swallow. She’s saying something but I can’t hear her. The first thing I notice is the look of worry on her face. Then I smell the paint. Her voice breaks through and she says, “Martin! Stop! Snap out of it!” I look closer to see her expression of utter fright. “You should have seen your face! Wh
at happened?”
“What do you mean? I was painting,” I tell her.
It is difficult for me to describe the sheer horror in her voice, and I suppose it is only because I must have seen the sight of the thing on the painting before, that I am spared the shock of what waits for her on the canvass.
And it’s not until she turns to see what my brush strokes have created, that she falls down in a screaming faint and doesn’t get up.
