Night Blue

by Angela, O’Keeffe

  I was taken on a short journey. When I was removed from the crate, I found myself in a sparsely furnished room. I heard later that the room was in Washington. Light came from a tall window and through that window I saw a pink- flowering tree. It might have been a cherry tree, I’m not sure. The name is not important. It is the feeling a thing engenders that matters, not its name.

  There were three men and one woman in the room, all gazing intently at me. The men wore suits. They were strangers to me, but the woman I knew.

  Much about her had changed. Her brown hair was now streaked with grey. Her once slim body had thickened. But I knew her by her gleaming eyes, and by her odd, crooked- mouthed beauty. She was Lee Krasner, Jackson’s wife. I didn’t know her well. Of course I knew the silence that she’d spoken through the skin of her arm to Jackson as they stood together about to board a train; that silence was a part of me. But I was barely acquainted with the woman herself. It seems strange to say it now, but at that time I wasn’t aware that Lee was also an artist. She’d come to the barn a few times while I was being painted, sitting on a stool and watching Jackson as he moved around me, but she seldom spoke. She watched him, she watched me, she watched the floor beside where I lay. Her eyes were large and made for watching.

  On one visit she said, ‘The chicken will be done.’

  On another, ‘Clem is coming Saturday, he’s bringing Helen Frankenthaler.’

  And once, while staring at the window, ‘The shadow is the thing, the shadow.’

  ‘Is this painting Blue Poles?’ one of the men now asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice softer yet somehow stronger than I remembered it.

  ‘Was it painted by Jackson Pollock?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was it painted by anyone else besides Jackson Pollock?’

  A hesitation. So slight. Yet the length of a whole day, a week, a century. A hesitation into which much could be postulated, argued over, inferred.

  ‘No.’

  Outside the light sank, faded. It was almost dusk.

  ‘ That will be a relief to the Australians.’ The others laughed.

  ‘If you would sign here.’ Another man was motioning towards a small table.

  She took the pen from him, bent her large body forward and wrote on the paper that lay on the pale wood. And I wondered why Jackson hadn’t come, why it wasn’t him signing that paper. I assumed he was too busy. I hadn’t forgotten how he’d ignored me after I’d returned to the barn, absorbed by the painting that had been laid out on the floor like it was the centre of his world now, the intentness of his gaze and the shaping of his gestures directed towards it and not me.

  I didn’t guess the real reason.

  The man took the paper and slid it carefully inside a folder as if the words on it might tip off. Then all three men said goodbye to Lee and left without another glance at me. To some, a painting lives only in ways outside of itself. The paper in the folder was alive; I was not.

  Lee stayed a while longer. She did not take her eyes from me. Once, her mouth moved as if to speak, but she didn’t speak. When she left I watched her through the window as she passed by the pink flowering tree. She paused to look up into its branches, the skin at her neck sagging with odd grandeur. And I thought of how Jackson used to look at things – his paints, a cigarette, me – with an intensity and yet a looseness, as if the object he was studying was at once the most important thing in the world and something to dismiss.

  Lee walked on and I knew that I would remember this scene of her standing, looking. I knew that there was something in it, some thread or idea, that I would circle back to in time.

  6

  On the journey to Australia the only sound I heard was the roar of the ship’s engines, and by its very constancy I soon lost awareness of it and entered a deep and soothing silence, a silence that was not sleep but a kind of sleep, for it had the potency of dreams.

  7

  What struck me first when I arrived in Sydney was the smell. I’d always lived in close proximity to the sea, first on Long Island, and then in New York. But, despite the unmistakable aroma of the sea, this place was infused with an aroma that was deeper, and stranger, than that of the sea, an aroma that was rusty and gnarled. I didn’t know what eucalypts were, let alone that the smell came from a plant. I only knew that I liked it, that somehow it belonged to me.

  I was taken in a vehicle to the Art Gallery of New South Wales – though at the time I did not know that this was where I was being taken. I was only aware of the smell of this new place and the cry of gulls, and the light, the power of which I could sense even through the veneer of wood, a light so bright that it seemed to offer a different story of the world. A new story, an old story, as if both at once were possible.

  Still inside the crate, I was taken inside a building and into a room. I knew the room was large by the way the voices that now surrounded me sounded at varied distances. They were excited voices, anticipation in their tone but also a kind of unease. Or perhaps defensiveness is a better word. In any case I knew from my first moments in that room that something was amiss.

  When I was taken from the crate I found a small crowd before me. There was an intake of breath. Then more words. Beautiful, astounding, powerful, well worth, well done.

  Someone interjected. ‘Let’s get on with it. The prime minister will be here in three hours.’

  People dispersed and there was a flurry of activity. Ladders were brought out, along with boxes of elegant, dark-handled tools, wire and tiny jewel-like screws, the accoutrements for hanging a painting. I was examined, measured, lifted, tipped one way and then the other, all the while taking in my surroundings.

  The room was indeed large with high white walls and elegant arched doorways. There was a tall window at one end, with light gently coming through. Tables had been placed near the window and tablecloths were spread, flowers arranged. Roses, dark and sweet smelling, and white sprays of baby’s breath. Champagne flutes stood in glittering lines. Someone put on some music. I recognised it as a piece the man and woman had sometimes played in the New York apartment as they prepared to host a dinner party; I remembered their quiet concentration as they moved about, the smell of frying garlic, the bottles of wine placed on the table and the discussion about which wine would go with which course, and through it all the music calmly disruptive, the way a smooth sea can be disruptive, for every party had an undertow, some small mishap, like a late guest, a broken glass, a story or opinion that disappointed.

  The music put me on edge. The prime minister was coming. Was he the reason for the unease?

  Guests began arriving. The men wore black suits, the women shimmering dresses. They stood in groups, chatting, laughing, drifting towards me and then away. All seemed delighted with me; yet, still, the undertow. The talk died down and I noticed a man making his way through the crowd, smiling, nodding. All eyes were on him as he tossed his head as if to deflect some invisible obstruction. Cameras flashed.

  I remember Whitlam now in snatches rather than as a whole man: his large hands, his lustrous hair, his pointed top lip. I recall, as he approached me, a penetrating softness in his eyes. He stood looking at me for a long time, his gaze making its way to every part of me, and with great care. I couldn’t recall ever being looked at so closely, other than by Jackson on the night he started painting me.

  Finally, he murmured, ‘Magnificent.’

  His voice was deep, mellifluous. He left me to mingle with the crowd. Later, however, he returned and stood near me and gave a speech, from which I learned that while all present were in favour of the purchase of this ‘wonderful abstract expressionist painting’, there were others who weren’t, others who thought I was ‘a waste of taxpayer’s money’.

  ‘Time will prove them wrong. This painting will prove them wrong,’ said the prime minister.

  I took Whitlam’s words with me as I travelled to the exhibitions around Australia, as I experienced the antipathy and bewilderment and occasiona
l warmth of the people who queued to see me, the expressions on their faces flummoxed yet calculating, as if they’d come not to discover what they thought of me but to prove what they’d already decided. After Sydney was Brisbane, which smelled muddy because of a recent flood, then Melbourne and Adelaide. As the weeks passed and the queues of visitors grew longer the prime minister’s words drummed a beat in me, a beat that seemed to belong to some approaching event. As more people came to view me, people who declared themselves either for or against me, some quoting snippets from the newspapers, I learned the logistics of my new life.

  After the tour I would be taken to Canberra and placed in storage until the building that would become the National Gallery of Australia was completed. Because I was so expensive, the government, headed by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, had guaranteed the extra funds needed by the gallery to purchase me, and – if the newspapers were to be believed – the Australian people were outraged. Outraged at my price tag. One point three million dollars. It was at the time the most ever paid for a modern painting anywhere in the world. And, to add insult to injury, I wasn’t even a good painting.

  ‘A child could have done it,’ one paper claimed. Another said I was painted by a couple of artists on a drunken binge, which puzzled me. I remembered Jackson at the window, the smoke from his cigarette going out to the rain, no one else in the room, no one else in his thoughts or in the beat of his heart but me. Of course, I remembered Lee’s hesitation before answering the question about whether anyone else besides Jackson had painted me. And as I heard the story repeated over days and weeks, I began to wonder if it could be true, if another artist had been there, out of range of my awareness, drinking with him, painting with him, talking and laughing with him. For what we trust as memory is really a story we tell ourselves, a story that comes as much out of our future, as out of our past.

  After years in the easy ambivalence of a household, I was now an exhibit that everyone had an opinion about. Even some who claimed to admire me were affronted by the circumstances of my purchase. The extravagant amount spent on a single, foreign painting could have been used to purchase the works of many Australian artists, they said. To quote one of the guides working at the gallery years later: ‘No other painting in Australian history has drawn so much interest or criticism.’

  Yet I began to suspect that Australians – at least those who came to see me – weren’t as outraged as the papers claimed them to be. Condemning, yes, but there was a laconic tone to their condemnation. I remember one woman staring at me for a long time before leaning towards her companion. I assumed by the gentle set of her face that she might say something in my favour, but she murmured, ‘I’d have rathered a new hospital.’

  Paul Hogan, the comedian who years later – so I learned from another tour guide – reached worldwide fame for his Crocodile Dundee character, was filmed screwing up his face and holding his nose as he looked at me. Yet between takes his smile was easy, and I sensed he had no real rancour towards me. The Australians spoke with a flattened accent, their sentences were short, as if words tired them. They laughed quietly, almost apologetically. In some I detected a grudging admiration. ‘Whitlam might be an idiot when it comes to money,’ I heard one say, ‘but at least now America knows where we are on the map.’

  What entered me most deeply in those early days in Australia was the aroma that, I now knew, came from the eucalyptus trees that were unique to this country. The visitors brought it into the gallery in their clothes and in the pores of their skin. It floated from them as they moved, as they spoke. One day, a woman with a mass of brown curls walked by me and a eucalyptus leaf fell from her hair. I watched the leaf as it lay before me on the floor all day and all night. I studied its dull grey surface, its long sides and the twist at one end, as delicate as the corner of a child’s lip. I gave it the same dreamy attention that the woman in the apartment had given to her daughter as she read. The same dreamy attention that Jackson had given me as he stood at the window.

  ‘I am yours,’ I found myself saying, just as the leaf was swept up in the early hours of the next morning by a cleaner’s broom. Of course they were silent words, spoken the way Lee had spoken through her skin to Jackson. But the leaf, twisting and tumbling under the broom’s bristles, showed no sign of having heard.

  The tour ended towards the end of nineteen seventy- four, when I was brought to Canberra.

  8

  The storage room, which would be my home for the better part of a decade, was situated in the suburb of Fyshwick. The room was narrow, scrupulously clean and windowless. There were other paintings being stored there, works that, like me, were being collected for the new gallery, works of varying sizes and each encased, like me, in a protective wooden crate. I did not discover the identity of any of these works. If I’d tried, I suppose I might have caught glimpses of line and colour and texture through the wooden crates, but the truth is I wasn’t interested in them. Nor did I sense that they were interested in me. A painting lives a singular life, resistant to periods or schools or whatever labels people want to group them by. People themselves are what interest a painting.

  Over recent years, however, I have found exceptions to this rule. Such as the entire days when I am taken by the iridescent beauty emanating from the floor below me in the National Gallery (to be precise, from the mauve and grey eucalyptus leaves in a Grace Cossington Smith, reminding me, perhaps, of my first days in Canberra and my declaration of love to a leaf ). Entire days when I am absorbed in the hills of the Queenie McKenzie on the ground floor, reminding me of the shape of Camelback Mountain Jackson knew from his childhood and gave to me. Entire days when I am lost in David Hockney’s A Bigger Grand Canyon, which hangs in the next room; it stirs a memory of Jackson’s when, as a teenager, he lay next to his father at the edge of the Grand Canyon and he felt the air rising up out of the canyon, felt it on his face. It was all it took, that air, to make him know he was an artist.

  And occasionally, on nights when I feel a particular mix of restlessness and solitude and am struck by an odd sense of striving, when I am aware of the limits of myself and am in awe of those limits – on those nights, my awareness goes to the concrete river that runs between the hollow log coffins of the Aboriginal memorial on the ground floor. I roam along that river and observe the coffins made from the trunks and branches of trees of varying heights. Starkly beautiful and painted with ochre, inside each is a space carved to house the bones of the dead. Near the top of many a hole created so that the soul of the dead can see out. As I follow the course of that river I know that the existence of all else in the building – art, silence, the approach of morning – all of it originates here.

  But back then in the storage room I was young and full of myself. Which is to say, I was still finding out how to breathe, how to be, and other works of art got in the way of that. I knew, instinctively, that it was people I needed – people taking me in, and me them. Apart from the great attention given to a painting by its artist, for what other reason do we exist?

  I remained in storage for eight years waiting to be part of the new gallery. A long wait. Yet it was not time wasted. Isolation can bring our attention to what lies dormant in us, to those talents and obsessions that prove a kind of threshold to our longing.

  9

  You must sense that there is someone, something, that exists behind this story, a narrator, a speaker, a purveyor of words.

  This is the part of the story where she becomes known to you; she dips her toe in the water; her shadow passes by a window; she turns in a crowd and smiles, then melts away.

  Oh, at last, you think. The big reveal.

  Or, rather, the small reveal, for this is a small book. You know it; you hold it in your hands.

  But don’t be too sure the narrator is the narrator. There is me to contend with. And you have barely a clue about her yet.

  I drift towards her. To drift is not a passive act. I approach her, and she approaches me, each like an ocean coming
towards a shore. We are a team, I hate the word (and so, perhaps, does she). It has no place in art, but here it is, cast up from the world of sport, cast up from the world of business. It lies exposed and glimmers just a bit.

  In my isolation I started to become aware of things I couldn’t logically know. What had begun years earlier with a burgeoning sense of the thoughts and feelings of the children in the apartment, and with my experience of the scene as I was lowered from the New York skyline, now went further; I reached beyond the limits of myself.

  I knew that the houses of the Australian Parliament were long and white and that a rose garden blossomed at one end; I knew that sulphur crested cockatoos came to the garden at dusk and sang their raucous song to the roses and to the stands of eucalypts that lined the edge of the grass, and I knew that the song made its way out of the garden through the tall narrow gate called ‘constitution gate’, crossed the glassy lake and went from tree to tree, from bird to bird, from ridge to ridge, until it reached the ocean somewhere south of Sydney where it glistened on the dark water.

  My only visitors to the storage room were a bald man and a young woman with red plaits who came regularly to ensure the paintings weren’t suffering from damp, dry, dust or heat. They moved cautiously and only spoke in murmurs. One day as they crept around the cramped room, sliding from their crates this painting and that, their skin glowing in the dim light, it occurred to me that the journey of the cockatoos’ song from the rose garden had come to me from one of them.

  This was confirmed on their next visit. As the woman, whose name I’d learned was Alyssa, paused before me and pulled on her white gloves, a dimple appearing in her cheek, I knew that she studied Fine Arts at the Australian National University. I knew that after class she walked back to her parents’ house through the rose garden at Parliament House, I knew that some weekends she went to the coast to see her grandmother, driving alone across the ridges and plains, and I knew that on one of these journeys she’d imagined the call of a cockatoo following her, shadowing her, all the way to the sea.