Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/234

 slapping gulp, presaging change of tide. Creation of the arts was a great river into whose course was emptied tributaries of images after being blocked by stones and weeds of doubt and incapability until released by some individual primary force to join the main current.

He switched on the green-shaded bulb over the trestle drawing table.

An electric bulb might be a symbol of functional beauty as now touted but it was damned hard on the eyes. Without light there is nothing to paint, even with the mind's eye. Seems to me I first began thinking about light when sixteen, standing on the 42nd St. Library steps facing Broadway's skyglow. He sure had been an insufferable nuisance to the libraries. Would have taken months to read books I asked for each night after work and a fifteen-cent supper at the Automat. The art critic of the World thought me nuts too when I tried to talk about light. "Your job is to handle copy, boy."

The eye is a small bulb, or sun, lighting life so you can if lucky ascertain its meaning. Abstract painters are nocturnal painters at heart, or necrophiles, like those surrealist boys. If in nothing is to be found reality why not hang the blank canvas stretcher on the walls? Better not say that aloud or Cynski sniffing the daily rehash of aesthetic hot air would offer it as his latest innovation. But how about nocturnal painting? There's Ryder, but enough is enough, and the same goes for the Thames at night. Never equals the night itself. Turner at least got sunset and opalescence. Some difference though in the opalescent flesh of the Rubens "Helena Fourment" in Vienna. Or how about the opalescence of Venice? Lucy Claudel on a balcony overlooking the Canal. A Caravaggio lady of the evening in cerulean daylight. No, she's not heavy enough, she's more a Longhi without domino. Remember to grind me some cerulean tomorrow.

He looked at the array of his implements as a gourmet at a spread of delicacies and felt his pulse throb in his fingertips. There were the velvet leads of the hand-sharpened pencils, pliant quills, stiff pen points, pointed brushes waiting to swell with water color, flat sable brushes resilient against buttery oil paint, powdery pastels, absorbent and non-absorbent paper, the perfume of turpentine, squat bottles of oil, sticks of brittle willow charcoal and at last on the easel, a canvas of the subject he knew best in all her characteristic movements and moods.

He looked at Simone on the canvas. No matter how much he deliberately changed his model there was a kind of characteristic 222