A Valentine’s Day Meditation
This Valentine’s Day, I decided to write a deeply touching, loving message to my wife.
Of course, things seldom turn out to be what we anticipate or want them to be. I think that’s why I write. That’s why I paint. And I’ve accepted that I really don’t know much about anything, but I am always curious about how things will turn out. My mother used to tell me that as a child I loved playing in the mud, forming shapes that never really resembled anything, and then laughing with delight at my creations. How little has changed in seven and a half decades.
My wife doesn’t realize it, of course, but she is a most wonderful woman. Even when she criticizes me, which she does infrequently, she does it with a compliment. For example, in recent months I’ve spent so many hours painting each day that she sometimes feels neglected. She told me that she feels at moments like Monet’s widow. Monet! She could have said she felt like a painter’s widow, but she had to compare me to one of the greats. I suggested that perhaps she was just comparing herself to the most unhappy painter’s wife she could think of, but she said no, she actually loves the fact that I’m so involved.
This led to a discussion of how fortunate she is that I have stuff to occupy me instead of being underfoot all day. Of course, I’m fortunate, too, to have stuff I want to do. And she asked me to describe what makes writing and painting so absorbing.
I explained that when I’m writing, I go to bed at night thinking about what my characters will do the next day. How Bahari will deal with the discovery that his grandmother is dying. Whether Elsbeth will confront her husband, who has dementia, with new evidence that he had an affair fifty years earlier.
For the last few months, I’ve been taking a painting course online, relearning some of the basics I never mastered or have forgotten. Things like light and shadow, value and edge, volume and depth. Instead of dousing my pigment with linseed oil or other mediums, I am reduced to using a dropper to add just five drops of oil to an inch or so of paint squeezed from a tube.
Instead of having access to every pigment in the universe, I’m limited—for the first block of painting consisting of twenty exercises—to four gradations: extreme shadow, moderate shadow, moderate light and extreme light. The discipline is both rigorous and exhilarating. Now I go to bed fantasizing about how the palate knife creams pigment and oil together into a shiny paste with a butter-like texture. How I marry the tip of my brush to the darkest shade of extreme shadow, as I encourage pigment to infiltrate the bristles in order to shape the brush into a flat, elongated edge. And, finally, the application of paint to canvas, a process at once visceral, intimate and breathtakingly delicate.
It’s something like sex, except that instead of rapid, ragged breathing, my breath slows as it does when I meditate. I join the edges of pigment with exquisite, feathered strokes in order to shape a clean edge between objects, where light and shadow are clearly defined. I use admixtures to achieve gradients, gradual darkening or lightening, where shadows bend around curved surfaces.
I go to bed thinking of how generously my brush feeds pigment to the canvas, how thirstily the canvas drinks as I offer just the right quantity of pigment, how the paint seems to know just where it needs to go from the tip of my bristles to fill the tooth, the raised texture of the canvas.
Rather than painting a jug or an apple, I am relearning to create only the variations of light and shadow. As with writing, where my characters develop themselves and the story ends up telling itself, I’m discovering in my painting that the apple and the jug and the cylinder and the blossoms and the thorned stems of the persimmon tree emerge fully formed from light and shadow. It’s like the miracle of a love affair. How fortunate I am to have more than one in my life.
Happy Valentine’s Day, my love.