Night Blue

by Angela, O’Keeffe

  Finally, just after the little bell sounded at a quarter to five, a warning that the gallery would soon close, she stood, stretched, put her notebook in her bag and left. As she turned to leave, the guard smiled at her. She returned his smile. The next day she was back, and the next, and the next, the same routine: writing, staring, stretching, writing, standing to leave, giving the guard a quick smile.

  In this way, a year passed.

  16

  Towards the end of that year, when she was close to finishing this story I tell through her, or she through me – take you pick – something began to shadow her. I am more aware of it now, in retrospect, than I was then, but even so the thing unsettled me at the time.

  It fluttered around her, transparent, its presence real but inconclusive. It was always with her, though some days it was more restless than usual and she was unable to sit for long, and she wrote little on those days, instead pacing back and forth as if she were trapped and must figure a way out. After the pacing, she sometimes settled and wrote with a kind of exhausted precision, seeming dissatisfied with the words that were scrawled across the pages; they were never as magnificent as she wished them to be, though occasionally they were more magnificent, and it was the possibility of this that kept her writing, that kept her resplendent without food.

  Other days the shadow made her uncomfortable no matter what she did. She could only shift in her seat, adjust her shoulders or the hang of her skirt, but she could never get comfortable. She wrote little on those days.

  I came to think of the shadowy thing as Alyssa’s writer- self. It was a strange being. It had the vulnerability of a sickly plant combined with a ferocious will. It wore her out, bringing out bags beneath her eyes and lines either side of her mouth. Yet equally it made her sparkle; her eyes shone, her body drifted elegantly on its current.

  At the end of that year a scrap of the words she wrote made its way from her notebook and into me. I was intensely interested in this scrap. In a moment you will see why. I wonder now why it took so many months for this scrap to come to me. It may have been that I was still in a somewhat numb state after receiving Jackson’s memories, it may have been that words themselves were still too strange to me; they were things that dropped, that rolled on the floor, that flew around a room; to gain meaning they had to be translated by me, they had to be given colour, line and shape. Without translation they were truncated, mis- formed things. Of course, I could ascertain a degree of meaning from them, I knew enough to get by. But until the day of the scrap of words to which I refer, and on which this story hangs, the hook, as it were – until that day words were still the half-living, to me.

  It was morning. Alyssa sat writing. She’d washed her hair. It shone damply, her fringe stuck to her brow. The scrap drifted from her hand as she wrote; through the quiet air it came, the air filled with invisible life, with thoughts and emotions and memories, with dreams and desires and tiny insects, with particles of light, and I moved instinctively to accommodate it, not a sudden movement, by any means, or vast, but miniscule; to the naked eye, in fact, utterly indiscernible.

  It was a scrap indeed. An image, imprecise, words circling and leaving gaps. It was difficult to make out what the image was, the effort to bring it into focus too great. Then the words found a rhythm, of sorts, and some of the gaps began to fill.

  A floor. Cracks between its boards.

  A shape appearing on the boards.

  An island?

  No.

  A ship?

  No.

  I knew it in a rush: the toes, the heel, the sole, all the parts were there. A footprint, yes, a footprint, and its colour was blue.

  I remembered Jackson kicking off his boots, the laces flailing like dying things. I remembered the feel of the boards against my back, the cold air coming up through the cracks, the cold air that told me I was alive, but not to wonder about it, for nature did not wonder.

  I was more than nature then – or less. I knew it from the start.

  Now my longing aimed itself, unflinching. I was sure that this one image, an image I myself had not noticed as I was being painted, held the key to a secret. This story could have gone in any number of directions, but it goes this way. I am made of a million stories, I’m sure you know this. This is just one. This one, right here.

  When did you go there? I asked her.

  Why did you go there?

  Tell me everything.

  It was as if she hadn’t heard me. She went on writing and a patch of sunlight came through the tall window and arrived at one knee, then the other. Finally she looked at me the way a mother looks at a child who will not stop pestering her with questions, a pucker on her lips. She squared her bony shoulders, turned to a new page and resumed her writing, and I knew the words on that page as if they were coming from my own self.

  Part Two

  Alyssa

  Art is not only about something; it is something.

  Susan Sontag

  17

  Let me begin by stating that I do not admire you. Please don’t take offence – or do take offence if you must, but hear me out. Admiration is a shallow thing. I saw a man in the supermarket the other day admiring a packet of frozen peas. I’m not sure if it was the thought of the peas themselves or the shivering feel of the packet in his hands that he admired most, but you take my point.

  What I feel for you is different to admiration and not so easily categorised. To call it love at this point is to fall short. It has to do with how I live now, how I have lived this past year. I’ll start, I suppose, at the start.

  I used to come to see you years ago when I was a student of Fine Arts at the Australian National University here in Canberra. Through a friend, I landed a part-time job assisting a conservator whose job it was to check on some paintings in a storage room in Fyshwick. You know the room well – it was a kind of prison for you, I imagine. Or was it a refuge after the furore surrounding your purchase?

  I’m certain you remember me, though I’m not sure how you feel about me. The fact that you’ve asked me these questions indicates a level of trust, perhaps.

  It was the days of Whitlam. You know about those days. You were central to them; central as a symbol, if nothing else. Those days, now that they are long over – what has it been now, twenty years since he was sacked? – those days are seen through rose-tinted glasses. They carry the sheen of nostalgia, they were a time when most of the things that matter all mattered at once. The Arts, human rights, health care, Aboriginal Land Rights, free university education, women’s rights. The list of changes to legislation and policy during the Whitlam era is impressive and far-reaching. But even before we knew the extent of that list, while we were still immersed in the days themselves, caught in the slow sashay of earth around the sun – even then, they were wonderful days.

  It was a time when I discovered a new freedom in myself. I took hold of it with both hands and strode around with it. But I was also defensive of it – a sure way to weaken freedom, though I didn’t know this then. I looked for its enemy in you – yes, you –in the shape of Jackson’s footprint. I believed that finding that footprint would validate some wrong about him and how he had been viewed in history. Of course, the footprint, left from when he’d painted you, had been seen by others; it wasn’t as if I was searching for something new. But I believed I would cross a threshold by finding it. In some ways this has proven to be true.

  I should explain. You’ve recently had a glimpse of a footprint that Jackson left on the floor of the barn where you began. I gave you that glimpse through my notebook to pique your interest. But years before, when I came to see you in the storage room, there was another footprint. It was also Jackson’s. The footprint that is in you.

  Are you aware of it? It is mostly obscured by layers and lines of paint. My friend told me about it when I first got the job in the storage room. She knew exactly where in you it was situated, but I would never let her tell me. I wanted to find it for myself. But in all the
times I visited you I never did.

  I believed that finding that footprint would prove that Jackson was unfit for the status he’d acquired – prove it to me, that was. You see, the new freedom that I carried around was underpinned by a belief that women artists were historically undervalued, under-recognised. It’s impossible to deny it. But just because a thing is true doesn’t mean that the way you go about proving it – that is, the dogged obsession that becomes like a tic – is the best way. I knew all along that finding that footprint was no proof of anything other than that Jackson painted shoeless. From the start, there was nothing rational about that search. Though, as things turned out it was not counterproductive, in the end.

  But I was speaking of Whitlam.

  By we, I mean those who still voted for him after the dismissal. Those who stuck to him, those with a modicum of loyalty. I haven’t forgiven the voters who left him in droves after November 1975 and caused him to lose the election the following month. You might point out that no one caused the loss of that election more than Whitlam himself, and I couldn’t untangle the reasons why this might be true and the reasons why it might not be. I only know what I believe, which makes me a poor judge. I am as ill-equipped for the world of politics as a koala is for a swimming pool, which is to say that while koalas can swim they prefer not to and will quickly drown in a pool that does not provide an easy way to climb out. But to tell this story it is necessary to speak of politics and so, from time to time, I must wade a little way in.

  The main thing is I knew you back then in the time of Whitlam. I visited you in the storage room. There were other paintings. A Malevich I remember well. Small, at least in comparison to you, consisting of coloured rectangles arranged on a white background. House under construction, it was titled, and I felt uncharacteristically optimistic and reassured when I looked at it, as if my wishes, even those I was not yet aware of, might be constructed as easily as a house.

  Am I making sense? I loved the Malevich. While you I did not love – not then. You were too large and insistent to love, and there was something else about you. Something I have already touched on and will come back to. Of course, I appreciated the fact that Whitlam had promised the money for your purchase; you represented a yes to art in this country, even though for tens of thousands of years art had been a staple of the very turning from day to night, a staple of the very insistence of life as meaning beyond itself. It must be acknowledged that Whitlam said yes to something that had long been here.

  You remember the bald man I worked with? A lovely man: shy, unassuming. He and I made a good team for a while. He was the scientific one: he would notice a mark on a painting almost before it was there, while I was good at feeling the life in them, that more nebulous thing, sensing when they needed shifting or simply to be gazed at. But teams are never forever. You and me, for instance, together now, me writing and staring at you, you staring back. It will not last. Not even marriage lasts.

  Least of all marriage.

  ‘A marriage is a work of art,’ my mother once said to me during a particularly difficult time in my marriage. I suppose she was reaching for a metaphor I might understand. Whatever the case her words had the ring of truth.

  The man in the storage room – not the bald man, the other one, the one who came only once – do you remember? It was not long before Whitlam was sacked. You don’t?

  Let me describe him to you.

  He was tall and had an odd way of holding his head, tilting it back as if he feared he might not see everything he needed to. Strange in one so tall. He still holds his head like that. I am making fun of him; if you saw him you probably wouldn’t notice anything strange about his head.

  But he had been holding his head in that strange way the last time I looked at him, which was this morning as I left to come here to the gallery. He stood at the kitchen bench downing a coffee, dressed in a suit with no tie – he is a lawyer, hopes to be made a partner soon; his colleagues, or those of his colleagues he needs to impress, are thankfully not fussy about ties. He is my husband, you see, the boy who came to the storage room, the boy you may or may not remember, the boy who held – holds – his head at an odd angle.

  I am supposed to be telling you why I went to visit the barn on Long Island where you began. Not rabbiting on about Whitlam and my husband. I would apologise for the digressions if they really were digressions. But, you see, Whitlam and my husband are mixed up in it.

  My husband is mixed up in it like this. Several years ago, possibly four or five, how time has sped along, I wanted to have a baby. I was working as a tutor in Fine Arts at my old university. My husband and I tried and tried, by which I mean we had a lot of sex. I’ll spare you the details, suffice to say it was a lovely time – the word try does not do it justice.

  But no baby came. We went to a doctor. Did we want to try IVF? This was a different kind of trying. I said no, my husband said yes.

  We argued about it. I was against it because I would have to go on hormones. A friend of mine had gone on them during treatment to fall pregnant and they’d sent her a little crazy: she’d ended up with depression so deep she was put in a psych ward for a time. The doctors said it wasn’t the hormones that had caused this but her disappointment in not falling pregnant. But I knew it wasn’t true. She’d told me she wasn’t actually that upset about not falling pregnant; it had been her husband who wanted the baby most. She would have been fine if it didn’t happen. But doctors don’t like to put the blame on a pill in a packet with a clear label, they like to put it on emotion, that vast, unfathomable wonder that lives and breathes in us, that can’t be defined or accurately described. Psychology tries but fails, philosophy too; only art comes close.

  It was around this time that my mother came up with her metaphor, as I sobbed to her over the phone one night. A marriage is a work of art. Through the window the moon seemed sharp and unkind.

  Eventually I agreed to the IVF. The call of the child was strong. I imagined them with wild unkempt hair and shining eyes climbing trees and rolling down grassy hills; I imagined them as a teenager with braces and a sharpening wit; I imagined them as a tiny baby suckling at my breast, their skin soft as a petal, their fine hair moving beneath my contented breath.

  We did three rounds. That is, I did them and my husband watched (to be fair, he did more than watch, he had his own longings and disappointments to deal with, but short of going on the hormones himself he could not know what I was going through). The hormones made me bloated and sleepy. I did not become pregnant.

  What all this has to do with you is that at the end of the three rounds, with no baby and no more money to try, I started a PhD. The wild, giggling child who climbed trees and rolled down hills was pushed aside and in its place: Abstract Expressionism.

  No, not in its place – those words are misleading, they point to a stereotype, the barren woman seeking to fill a void. I am not that woman; no woman is that woman. Yet there is a breath of truth to the stereotype.

  For me, that truth goes like this. Abstract Expressionism came first. I’d been interested in it ever since my university days, ever since I’d come to the storage room. I did not love you, chiefly because I did not love Pollock. I’d read about the bruises that friends said they’d witnessed on Lee Krasner’s face and arms, yet Lee had all her life denied that he hit her. There was a story that he’d once chased her through the house terrorising her with a knife. It was only when Jackson took up with a mistress just months before his death that she finally left him. It seemed that she could put up with his violence but not another woman. I began reading about her, and in turn about Helen Frankenthaler, another artist from that era, arguably the most successful of the women Abstract Expressionists. But more on Lee and Helen later. What I am trying to say is that the absence of the child became a presence, not in a sad way (although sometimes I was sad), but in an urgent way. It was as if the child continued to run in me, stumbling, resplendent; it was as if what I’d lost had simply formed a new di
rection.

  18

  I am not a painter and have never aspired to be one. I did not know until I left school that I wanted to write about painting. But painting and words had found me long before. When I was eight, I visited a friend’s house after school. Her grandmother lived with the family and she sat knitting in a corner. It was a big family: a long-legged teenager came in, stood staring in front of the open fridge, took a piece of some food, slammed the fridge and was gone; a toddler ran around the room, laughing, while an older child chased him. ‘Don’t make him fall,’ warned the mother, who stood at the sink washing up. Another baby was growing in her stomach; the bulge beneath her dress pushed against the sink as she stacked foamy plates into the dishrack. My friend and I sat at the table eating sliced banana on thick buttered bread. No one took any notice of us, much less of the grandmother knitting in the corner, and yet the click of the needles and her quiet concentration seemed to hold everything together in that room. By chance, a few weeks later, when we were in Sydney staying with my aunt during the school holidays, my parents took me to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. It was hot, we’d spent every day for a week at the beach, and now my mother insisted on ‘something educational’. In the gallery I stood before Grace Cossington Smith’s The Sock Knitter, and of course I thought of my friend’s grandmother. The connection between the real-life image and the painting fused in me as a kind of portent.

  My thesis centred on Lee’s and Helen’s roles in the development of Abstract Expressionism, and in Helen’s case, colour field painting, which was an offshoot of Abstract Expressionism that Helen herself was the instigator of. These were roles that, I argued, had been under-acknowledged. Abstract Expressionism, by the way, was a term that critics such as Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg used. The artists never liked the term as much as the critics did, nor did they necessarily adhere to its principles. Critics describe boundaries that artists can’t help but breach. Helen was in fact Greenberg’s girlfriend for a time when she was in her early twenties. He was much older, already an influential critic, and never once did he mention her name in print. Even taking into consideration an understandable desire on his part to avoid being seen as biased, given their intimate relationship, this was a glaring omission. He never gave her credit for her groundbreaking painting, Mountains and Sky, as the first example of what would become known as colour field painting.