The Forest Lover

by Susan Vreeland

  She puffed out a breath. “I thought I was!”

  “We all think we are. He says we’re not.”

  “Then what does he want? He could at least show us some examples.”

  “‘Chiaroscuro,’ he says. ‘Blend the colors to show curvature. Learn to see.’ ”

  “See how?”

  “The Fauves don’t blend. Their colors are flat.” He took a gulp of coffee. “I don’t know. I’ve been at Colarossi a year and I’m more confused now than when I started.”

  He was young, but his gray eyes seemed opaque and worn. His admission shaved a chip off her hope.

  More people gathered at the table of the Italian, who tipped his chair back behind stacks of saucers.

  “The one on the left is Henri Matisse. L’Académie de la Grande Chaumière. I’ve met him. He doesn’t blend. He outlines.”

  Paul kept glancing hungrily in their direction. Now that his acquaintance had arrived, he was itching to join them, would have if it weren’t for her, an encumbrance to him.

  She laid her centimes for the café on the table. “I have to go.” She stood up. “Thanks. I’ll bring you a new rag tomorrow.”

  • • •

  Over the next weeks, she struggled with embarrassment and the French impatience with her attempts to understand. Few books had color reproductions to study, and color handling was vital. Oil paint tugged against her brush in a way that watercolor never did. Paul stopped coming to class. Laffont gave her little attention. She tried to glean from others’ work and their reaction to hers whether she was improving, but that was guesswork. Claude’s Mademoiselle Courageuse did not exist here. Where was her spirit song?

  Alice loved everything. She took French and history classes at the American Student Hostel, did all the communicating with waiters and shopkeepers, went on long walks, and noted everything in a journal. Paris seemed to wake her up. She laughed more. She forgot and fluttered her left hand with the shortened finger when trying to think of a word in French.

  One hot September Saturday, Alice packed a cheese, a baguette, and two peaches, and insisted they have a picnic in the shade of the cemetery near their pension. They followed the spiked iron railing past raised tombs frilled with Gothic tracery. Cats slept on the granite slabs, and lovers lounged on the grass. Emily and Alice sat on a bench opposite a limestone angel.

  “Stone. Paris is stone. We left the world of wood when we left home,” Emily said.

  “Just think how old some of these stones are, and the stone buildings. They laid the foundation of Notre Dame in the twelfth century. Doesn’t that make you shiver?”

  “As old as some cedars.” Emily pulled the piece of cedar bark out of her bag.

  “You brought that thing halfway around the world?” Alice tossed crumbs from the baguette to some sparrows.

  Emily held it to her nose. “It reminds me why I’m here.” She tipped her head back to see patches of tin-colored sky among the leaves. “At least they left some trees in Paris. I like this spot.”

  “I knew you would. That’s why we came.”

  “You’re good to me, Alice. Thanks.”

  They watched sparrows snatch up crumbs in jerky movements. Timid ones picked up the leavings the more aggressive ones left.

  “Crumbs. I’m only getting crumbs of instruction.”

  “Maybe you expect too much. Of yourself, I mean.” Alice clapped her hands together once. “Why don’t you take the afternoon off and we could go to some galleries? They’re free.”

  “Gibb said galleries don’t show what’s really new.”

  “Then we could go to Luxembourg Gardens. It’s not far.”

  “Pictures don’t get painted wandering through parks.”

  “It’s a weekend, Millie. This is Paris. We’ll probably never be here again.”

  “We definitely won’t if I don’t improve faster. I need to work on weekends too.”

  Alice tossed her last crumbs to a sparrow too skittish to join the fray. He bounced toward the stone angel to snatch them.

  “Alice, look! That stone angel.” She grabbed Alice’s arm and spoke fast. “Amazing! Does it look bluish white on top and pale charcoal brown on its undersides to you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it does to me. You see its shape, don’t you?”

  “Generally.”

  “Those hue changes are what gives it shape. I see it now. It’s what Laffont meant!”

  Alice tipped her head and squinted.

  Emily studied the angel more intensely, afraid to let it go. Yes. Definitely. The difference wasn’t in the lightness or darkness of the stone but in its actual hue.

  “If this is an optical principle, I’ll see it everywhere, see how it’s shown in paintings. All right, Alice. Tomorrow we’ll go to Salon d’Automne. You’ll have to find it. Just tow me on a leash.”

  • • •

  They took the métro to the Champs-Élysées and walked past a puppet show under chestnut trees and roundabouts for children. Emily watched for hue changes in geometrically hedged courtyards and Neoclassical stone façades. Under a striped café umbrella advertising an apéritif, a woman dressed in fluid emerald crepe posed while sipping an opaline green drink. Emily slowed.

  “Absinthe,” Alice whispered, as if it were dangerous even to say it out loud. “They say it’s made from wormwood.”

  “The dress, Alice. I’m looking at her dress.”

  Above the woman’s bosom, the hue of her dress was yellower, and where it fell in folds from her lap, the shadows were bluer. New eyes, she thought. She was seeing with new eyes!

  Fluted columns announced the Grand Palais, roofed in curved glass, the entrance topped by marble muses.

  “Now that’s a building built to tell you something,” Emily said, feeling spirited as they started up the broad stairway to its monumental porch and arched door.

  The main gallery was a madhouse of noise. Passions rendered in pigment exploded in hundreds of paintings. Sulphur yellow, crimson lake, cerulean blue sprang out of their frames hung edge-to-edge up to the ceiling.

  “It’s garish and unnatural,” Alice said, “the colors they use. A red sky? A green and orange bridge? Blue horses?”

  “They’re expressive all the same. It’s what that article meant. Sensations of color.”

  She began to glimpse things as they walked from room to room. The brushwork left visible. Ridges of paint following the direction of the stroke which followed the object’s shape. Figures and objects outlined in black. The viewpoint never quite fixed. The essential exaggerated and the unimportant vague.

  As if from a dream, Alice’s thin voice reached her. “Do you really want to paint like this?”

  “Like what? Which? They’re all different.”

  Alice touched her temples. “The colors don’t go together. I’m sorry, Millie. It gives me a headache.”

  Alice slumped on a bench while Emily went through the exhibit again. At closing time, she found Alice hunched over her French grammar book, her nose inches from the page, her posture just like Emily felt—overwhelmed. What technique should she try first? Images battered at her on the way home. As they crossed the pont Alexandre with its ornate lampposts, square stone towers, and gilded angels, everything, all of Paris, seemed too heavy.

  “Of all the names, I don’t know who are the rising stars.”

  “Do you have to?”

  “I don’t know that either.”

  She fell into bed exhausted.

  A violin student one floor below squeaked the same four notes until they drove her mad. She closed her eyes to shut out the noise and to envision what she had seen. Vibrant, saturated color streaked across the window shade. The violin sounds became visible in orange, red, violet, and with the deep opacity of oil. She saw herself floating out the window. Above the pont Alexandre, she saw the Seine in yellow and purple. Unmixed daubs of pigment swam before her—Prussian blue trees, screaming orange faces, smeared vermilion skies. Was she asleep or aw
ake?

  Monstrous Madame Bagot shook oil brushes at her in one hand, blue leeks in the other, and Laffont shouted at her as if volume would make her understand. She felt herself sink under the bridge, plunge down like a whale to inky depths. She couldn’t breathe, and woke up coughing and crying, flailing at the colored water until she noticed Alice stroking her face.

  “It’s all right, Millie. It was only a dream.”

  She shivered in sweat and clutched the blanket. She was in bed. She was safe.

  “Talk to me,” Alice said.

  “A grown woman, nearly forty years old, crying because I’m so ignorant. I’ve progressed so little.” She slid down and pulled the covers up to her chin. “We come from such a backwater.”

  Alice put her cheek against Emily’s. “You’ve got to forgive our origins.”

  “Forgive the province I love for making me provincial?” She turned onto her side. “I don’t know if I’m improving at all.”

  “Why don’t you come with me to French class?”

  “I need every tick of the clock for art.”

  “Then go back to Gibb and ask where you can get critiques in English. Only do something.”

  “All right. All right.”

  • • •

  She went to his studio and spilled it all out.

  “Don’t you ever teach?” she asked in exasperation, plunking herself down where he directed her, on the model’s chaise longue.

  A softness came into his eyes. “Spring and summer only.”

  “Then where can I go? I only have enough money for a year, so you better tell me where I can learn fast.”

  He tapped his lips with his fingers all bunched together, thinking, and left a magenta paint smear on his mustache. “Go to John Duncan Fergusson at L’Atelier Blanche. A Scotsman known for Post-Impressionist styles. He’ll get you to ignore what isn’t right for you, and teach you in English what is. Tell him I sent you. Then in the spring, come see me again.”

  • • •

  Fergusson put on his red wool neck scarf and tucked it under his tweed jacket. It was late afternoon, time for him to leave. A big man with big hands and a big voice, he filled the spacious studio when he was there, and it seemed empty when he wasn’t, even if other students were there. He drew up a stool next to her.

  “You’re working too hard on small things, lass.”

  She snickered, the term so inappropriate for her.

  “Simplify your forms and you’ll see repetitions within that composition,” he said.

  She studied her canvas of a figure. “What if there isn’t any repetition?”

  “Oh but there is, sure. See the roundness of her shoulder and the edge of the circular table? Stretch both of them until they follow the same curve. That will give you rhythm,” he said. “Rhythm, that’s the thing.”

  “To see it on my own seems beyond my reach.”

  Dede’s words taunted her. Who do you think you are that you deserve to study art in Paris?

  Fergusson smiled at her in a fatherly way even though he was younger than she. “It’s coming. You don’t see it yet. Art isn’t just something a person does. It’s something he is. And you are. Let go your worries a mite.”

  His encouragement drove her, and she exhausted herself with overwork. A headache that lasted for a week made her so nauseous she couldn’t hold a brush, couldn’t eat, couldn’t get out of bed. Alice telegraphed home her alarm, and called for a motor taxi to take her to the infirmary of the American Student Hostel.

  “What seems to be the problem?” the admitting nurse asked.

  “I feel beaten and skinned alive.”

  The doctor prescribed bed rest. She stared at the tan blanket, cream-colored walls, white curtains hanging between beds, white uniforms. There was nothing to urge her to keep her eyes open. She slept fitfully, lost track of time, drifted.

  “The nurses took my petticoat,” she grumbled to Alice. “Color would at least remind me of why I’m here. I demanded it back. They threw it out. ‘Unsanitary, Mademoiselle.’ What cheek!”

  Alice gave her a stern look. “What was that you told me in Alaska about your Indian friend going right on after she lost a child? And you only lost a dirty slip.”

  “Unfair.” She rolled onto her side away from Alice.

  “You’ve been here seventeen days. If you don’t rouse yourself soon, we’ll have to go home.”

  “No.”

  Alice put a telegram on her blanket and left.

  Just like in London. Just as I predicted. This second illness in a big city ought to teach you. Give up on art. Come home. Stay home. Dede.

  Emily flung it across the room.

  The following day Alice brought her a crocus in a pot. Emily touched a violet petal as if it were a jewel. The bright yellow center quivered at the razor edge of sound.

  “There are more in Luxembourg Gardens,” Alice said in a tantalizing way. “New sap green leaves everywhere.” She fluttered her hands in the air.

  “How’d you know that hue name?”

  “I read your paint tube and translated.” Alice gazed at the ceiling and sucked in her cheeks. “All the cherry trees are budding. Too bad you won’t be able to see them bloom.”

  Emily sat up in bed. The passing of time shocked her. Spring already. She couldn’t bear to miss it, colors that produced the new art. To drench herself in apricot, tangerine, pomegranate, apple green, as fruit refreshes the tongue, that would cure her. Alice knew her better than she realized. A sister who wanted her to get out and paint.

  “Thanks, Alice. It’s a beaut. Better than a pill. I’m sorry I’ve been so spunkless.”

  16: Sisters

  She slumped onto a bench alongside the canal. Taking the short train ride from Paris yesterday and walking four blocks on cobblestones from her rented room today was all she could manage. Harry Gibb’s promise of special attention in his oil class here had roused her to come to this village, Crécy-en-Brie.

  For now, it was enough to breathe fresh country air and feast her eyes on the light washing the houses along the canal with honey tones. Women with suds up to their elbows slapped their clothes in stone wash booths along its edge. Kneeling like that, they reminded her of Sophie pulling roots. Drooping willows brushed the water. A breeze made ripples, which splintered light, breaking up the green liquid. How could she paint that action? Her brush strokes would have to be broken touches—green wisps, blue patches, red and violet daubs, yellow highlights—all to depict light bouncing off water.

  Gibb came across a bridge and along the canal path whistling. Dour old Gibb, whistling! He was carrying a cheese and a bouquet of pink lilies.

  “Pretty spot, eh?” she said. “In this light the water assumes so many colors.”

  “Same with shadows. They take on the hue opposite them.”

  He turned to the bridge. “Early tomorrow morning, take that bridge and follow the path to the base of a hill. Get there while the shadows are still long, and you’ll see what I mean. I’ll be there by eleven for a lesson. Mind you, have something to show me.”

  Something to show! She barely had enough energy to keep herself upright. After he left, she dragged herself back to her room and stretched out on the rose chenille bedspread. Dust motes swirled over her in a shaft of sunlight. She let her eyes close in delicious stillness. Just for half an hour.

  Her own snoring woke her in darkness. She turned onto her side. What did you come here for if you weren’t going to paint? Gibb’s voice rolled like distant thunder above her bed.

  She jerked awake. It was light again. Still in yesterday’s dress, she gathered her supplies, folding stool, and new adjustable easel, upright for oil, flat for watercolor, and hurried outside.

  It was still early enough that trees and houses laid their shadows across cobblestones and vegetable gardens. She bought a baguette and a salami and trudged across the bridge to the first rise, out of breath. Poplars with new leaves cast diagonal shadows over the path. Shadows of what co
lor? They seemed just a darker shade of the ochre of the dirt. That wasn’t what Gibb wanted her to see, was it? If he didn’t think she was capable of seeing what he saw, what then? Would he dismiss her?

  She laid in the cottages, hedgerows, poplars, and a copse tangled with honeysuckle and wild roses. What an astonishing miracle. Here she was, wrung-out Millie Carr, painting again, smack-dab in the middle of France, about to take a lesson from someone who cared enough not to let her waste the day.

  Gibb ambled up the path wearing a farmer’s straw hat and carrying two apples.

  “It’s a perfect whiz-bang day,” she said.

  He held up both apples, turning them, and gave her the more dazzling one, pale yellow generously streaked with red-orange. Taking a look at her canvas and the scene before them, he asked, “Are those shadows of the trees warmer or cooler than the earth?”

  “Cooler.”

  “What hues?” He waited for an answer. “Wrestle with it.”

  “Greens and blues.”

  “Right. Just as if the poplars and the sky were spread against the earth.”

  “Why in all my years of seeing haven’t I noticed?”

  “We’re trained by living to use our eyes to recognize objects, but not color unless we make a conscious effort.” He took her brush and dipped one edge in vermilion, the other in turquoise. She gasped.

  “Don’t be afraid to exaggerate,” he said as he blocked in shadows of the cottages.

  “I’d never have nerve enough to do that.”

  “Now you have to. You’ve got to key up your palette so the rest of your painting will be in accord with what I just did. Make a few commas in red-violet next to that alizarin crimson, add a dot of red-orange and see what happens to that patch of flowers.”

  When she did, the colors practically vibrated off the canvas. “This is the get-up-and-go I want all my work to have.”

  He smiled in that lopsided, tortured way of his. “Do you have another canvas board with you?”

  She pulled a small one out of her sketch sack and he set to work on the same composition but using hues she hadn’t seen, even ones she didn’t see now in the landscape. New admiration and gratitude flooded her. “You paint more than the scene. You paint into it what’s in your mind.”