THE NEXT DAY, Elsie wasn’t in class.
“We’ll be doing portraits of each other today,” Mary said. “You will find a partner and take turns. But first we’ll review the basic proportions of the face, in frontal and side view.” She stood at the board and drew an oval. “You can divide the face into four parts with three horizontal lines.”
Arthur Lismer opened the door. He looked agitated. Mary glanced at him and continued, “The top line is the line of the eyes, and the top of the ears, the next, lines up with the bottom of the nose.”
“I’d like to see you at the end of the class,” Lismer said. Jane cocked an eyebrow at Clare.
“And the final is the line of the mouth,” Mary went on without so much as a nod to Lismer. “Faces are the most challenging subjects to draw.” She looked off into the Tilia boughs outside the window. “Imagine the beloved face, how intimately we know its planes and surfaces, its blemishes, the cast of the eye.”
CLARE AND JANE DREW EACH OTHER. The class had spent a week drawing plaster busts and even a cast of an ear. The busts were still life.
“Do you know the French don’t call it still life but nature mort?” Mary had said one day. “Dead nature.”
Clare thought it fitting.
“You have a good eye,” Mary said and Clare looked up quickly to see if she was making a joke.
“Oh dear, my apologies,” Mary said.
CLARE FOUND PORTRAITS DIFFICULT. Jane’s face, even at rest, seemed to change, her hair flew away and settled, one eyebrow lifted, a corner of her mouth twitched. The smallest mistake in proportion ruined the likeness. The drawing had to be technically perfect. But it also had to be economical so that the subject’s spirit could emerge.
“Only the finest artists, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Lautrec, fully captured the spirit of their subjects,” Mary said.
When it was Clare’s turn to sit in profile she instinctively turned her good side to Jane.
“No, the other side,” Jane said. “It’s so much more interesting.”
Clare began to protest but she knew what Jane meant. Arthur Lismer had said that the purpose of art was to bring order and beauty to the world. But drawing was confusing her ideas of beauty. When she drew the scar on the back of Angus’s leg, it was so interesting it lost its ugliness. When she drew his genitals, they lost their strangeness. Lost in the act of seeing, she forgot to think of the subject as ugly or beautiful, and only thought of the beauty of line. It was as if drawing was a way of not only seeing but touching. She took her eye patch off and turned towards Jane.
The likeness was startling. The unflinching rendering of the collapsed lid of her left eye, the narrowing into an empty chamber. But also, the intense gaze of the good eye, staring out at Clare, demanding something extraordinary of her.
ARTHUR LISMER REAPPEARED at the door when their class ended. He was wearing his usual tweed jacket and wool vest.
“I’ll be right there, Arthur,” Mary said curtly.
“I’ll be in my studio,” he answered. He bounced on his toes. “Meanwhile, I want to remind you all that the show of war artists working here in Canada is opening tomorrow in the gallery upstairs. I hope you’ll all be sure to see it.”
Clare stayed to redraw her studies of Angus from the day before. She sorted through the plaster casts and found a replica of Michelangelo’s David. Perhaps she could use it for reference. The windows were open to the warm spring air and a lemony light fell through the new Tilia leaves. She pulled her drawings from her portfolio and laid them on the table. There were problems with the proportion of the limbs.
The windows of the next room, Arthur Lismer’s studio, were open and Clare could hear his raised voice. “For God’s sake, Mary, the girl’s parents and some of the board are insisting we fire you …” his voice took on quotation marks, “‘for rendering the classroom unwholesome and dangerous.’”
“What a backwards little wilderness this is.” Mary’s voice floated on air. “You trained in Europe, Arthur. You know as well as I, drawing the nude figure is fundamental art training for men and women.”
“Yes, of course, but Mary, my greater concern is, how do we change things here without getting closed down in the process?”
“Oh for heaven’s sake, I’ll speak to the board myself,” Mary said. “I’ll calm them down.”
A FEW MINUTES LATER Mary strode into the classroom and grabbed her coat. “Ah, my most diligent student. The others can’t seem to get out of here fast enough.”
“I have extra work to catch up on,” Clare said.
Mary looked down at Clare’s drawing. “This arm coming towards you is foreshortened. Don’t let your mind overrule your eye. Our minds are lazy, they don’t want us to look hard at things.” She pushed her arms into her coat roughly and said, almost to herself, “In art and in life.” Then she looked back down at Clare’s drawing and pointed to the arm extending out towards the viewer, “This arm is just as long as the other arm, which we can see in full length. But, in fact, we see almost none of the length of this extended arm, only the ends of the fingers and where it roots into the shoulder.”
Clare was learning to outwit her eye’s flat world. Depth was coming back, bit by bit. She had no idea how it happened, but she had stopped bumping into things, stopped reaching short. Yet foreshortening was still difficult to see. And harder to draw. “Thank you, I can see now what I did wrong,” Clare said. She touched her eye patch. “How did he get that scar, do you think?” she blurted.
“He’s a gardener of a friend of mine. He was in France.” Mary shook her shoulders and straightened her coat. “When the men advance from the trenches the German bullets often catch them in the thighs. Or slightly higher, poor devils,” she grimaced. “Our Angus was lucky.”
“Why is the scar on the back of his leg?” Clare said.
“He said he was turning to help a buddy. But,” she pulled her sleeves down, “he was probably running away.” She turned to leave. “He was later declared unfit for service.”
THE NEXT EVENING, Clare climbed the stairs up to the third floor gallery space. She was wearing her best long brown gabardine skirt and a white blouse with a wide collar and soft bow at the bottom of its deep V-neck.
Arthur Lismer was pacing from piece to piece, straightening them on the walls. There were two other girls from Clare’s class, standing in a corner as if waiting for instructions. Four older women, dressed in silk velour and pearls, stood in a cluster, talking. Wives of board members, no doubt.
She stopped at a framed text just inside the door and the matrons tilted their heads together and whispered. Clare had noticed before that people forgot that she could still see, even though she wore an ugly patch. She read:
The Home Front, Women at Work for the War
The British Member of Parliament, Canadian born, Max Aitken, now Lord Beaverbrook, established the Canadian War Records Office in 1916. Its efforts to document the war have included the commissioning of both British and Canadian artists to record the war in Europe. Artists were also commissioned closer to home. This collection includes studies, paintings, etchings, and sculptures of workers in Canada’s munitions factories.
Clare moved to the first painting. It was a small study in oil, called Women Making Shells, by Henrietta Mabel May. Workers stooped over lathes, concentrating on their task. The air was dusty from the turning of a thousand wheels. The women wore men’s pants and shirts.
The next work, an etching by Dorothy Stevens, Munitions, Fuse Factory, showed women on the factory floor working among a jumble of cables, pulleys, and lighting. Clare continued on to a plinth and a small bronze sculpture of a woman dressed in pants and work boots, her head bound with a kerchief. She stood tall, her strong muscular arms bare below her rolled shirtsleeves, a shell balanced on each shoulder.
“That’s Frances Loring’s work.” Mary, who had clicked into the room, stepped up behind Clare. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it? She trained at the Chicago Art Institute. That’
s where she met Florence. They live together in Toronto.”
“Florence?” Clare said.
Mary pointed to the next plinth. This was also a figure of a woman factory worker, leaning gracefully on a long metal rod. Woman with Adaptor, Florence Wyle, the card said.
“They’re all women!” Clare said.
“Well, this exhibit is of working women,” Mary said.
“No, not the subjects, the artists,” said Clare.
“Yes,” said Mary. She gave Clare a sharp look. “They wouldn’t send women to work as war artists in Europe. The women artists were only allowed to record the war effort at home.”
“Did they want to go to the front?”
“Some of us wanted to go very badly,” Mary said.
The well-dressed matrons left the gallery, shooting Mary critical sideways glances. Mary walked to the door. “Goodbye, Mrs. Adams, Mrs. Ridgely. I hope you liked the show,” she called sweetly. She spun on one heel and walked back to Clare, with an exasperated sigh.
More people had entered the gallery while Clare and Mary were talking. Clare turned to find a familiar figure looking at something across the room. He stood in front of a plaque by Frances Loring, called Noon Hour in a Munitions Plant.
“Do you like it?” Clare asked, walking over.
“Oh,” Fred said, turning.
He was wearing a blue-green shirt and grey corduroy pants. “It’s like something I saw a long time ago,” he said. “A carving from an Egyptian tomb.”
He rubbed his chin with the heel of one hand and regarded her with deep-set blue eyes. “What do you think, do you like it?”
A line of women, their profiles in bas-relief.
Clare wasn’t sure she liked it. It wasn’t like the reproductions of classical sculpture she had seen. The women were dressed in work clothes, not diaphanous robes, their bodies were not voluptuous but strong; they were not beguiling, but weary. One appeared to be rubbing her neck, one her shoulder, one, at the end of the line, just ahead of the male foreman, slumped as if asleep on her feet.
“It’s not beautiful. It’s … heroic.”
“Yes.” Fred kept his eyes on the women. “But the detail is beautiful, the folds of the cloth, and the faces, so tired.” He pressed his hands together as if in prayer.
Clare noticed again his long fingers, how strong and light his hands. A circle of warmth spread in the pit of her belly and she looked away, feeling the flush rise to her cheeks.
Mary had gathered the three students in the corner and was leading them to the etching of the munitions factory.
Clare and Fred carried on to a small studio beside the gallery where Arthur Lismer had hung his own War Records work. Centred, the painting Clare had seen him working on the first time she came to the school with Fred — a warship, bright with dazzle patterns, plowing a green ocean, on its way to the harbour. On either side, two more canvases, a convoy painted in sombre colours, and a summer scene, the harbour filled with the bright clutter of blue-and-white hulls.
Lismer, who had been talking to one of the silk-clad matrons, stepped up to Fred and Clare. “It’s a paradox, isn’t it? How something so destructive can be so beautiful. The ships make something almost decorative of what might otherwise have been a dreary subject. But it’s been devilishly hard to get close enough to draw the docks. Every time I sit down with my sketchbook someone sends the police after me.” He chuckled mirthlessly. “As if I’m some foreign spy.” He pointed to a black chalk sketch of a horse pulling a large gun up the ramp of a ship. “I got arrested for that one. One of the papers had been lashing up an argument against artists having access to the docks. The policeman wrote in his report that I was a suitable subject for internment. I had to wire Lord Beaverbrook to straighten things out. I’m not sure what people are afraid I’m doing. If all the stuff artists do was dropped from an airplane over Germany, it might stir up some submerged feeling for beauty within them, perhaps weaken their will to keep shooting us. But as for military information? Absurd!”
Fred shifted uneasily beside Clare.
The next drawing was a pen and ink of soldiers carrying bodies on stretchers and standing over others, covered in sheets on the ground.
“I didn’t know you were on the front,” said Fred.
“I wasn’t. This is Halifax.” Lismer folded his arms.
Clare looked more closely at the drawing. It was called The Loved One. A woman crouched tenderly over one of the bodies.
“I missed the train into town from Bedford that morning,” Lismer said. “Esther and Marjorie and I were just sitting down to breakfast when we heard a loud crack. Soot from the chimney sifted down onto the tablecloth. I thought the furnace had exploded and sent the girls outside with the dog. That’s when they called me to see the smoke rising over the city. Hell of a thing. I had to climb over coffins stacked in the street to get through the school’s front door. Fred, you remember Alex Knowles? One of our best students, gone.”
But Fred was looking at the figure in the drawing, laid out on the ground.
“Fred?” Clare said.
He looked up, absently. “Oh, sorry. Yes, of course I remember Alex.”
“Do you see some fault with the drawing?” Lismer said, with a slight smile.
“Oh no. It is an excellent drawing. It’s just — she reminds me of someone. May I walk you home?” Fred said, abruptly turning to Clare, as if Lismer had dissolved. “I’ve promised Celia I would stop by.” He had been coming to Rose’s regularly. Clare always knew when he was there because Celia played more fluently behind the drawing room door.
The school’s front door had loosened with the warm spring weather. It opened easily into a soft dusk and the scent of lilacs. Clare was filled with the memory of lying in the grass with Leo. It had been three months since the news that he’d gone missing. At first she could forget only for moments at a time, then an hour here and there. Lately, drawing, she felt brief bouts of happiness, but if she noted the sensation, it disappeared, and the ache in her breastbone returned.
“Who did she remind you of?” Clare asked.
“Who?” Fred said. His eyes looked almost turquoise in the golden light.
“The woman in the drawing.”
“Oh — one of the women from Chebucto School. I had to … take care of her. She was so young. She wore a ring I imagined her beau gave her. No one ever came for her.”
“You had to take care of her?” Clare said.
Fred slowed. “I told you. I worked at the morgue there after the explosion.”
“Oh,” Clare said.
“We spoke of it the night you took ill,” Fred said. “I’m not surprised you forgot.”
“I wasn’t ill,” Clare said.
“Have you forgotten that too?” Fred said, smiling.
“I was addicted to laudanum.”
She couldn’t say why she had suddenly told him. Perhaps because he seemed an outsider, as her affliction had made her. He stopped and looked at her. A lock of hair had fallen over his forehead. A short stubble of reddish gold shone on his jaw, as if he had forgotten to shave. It was difficult to catch the expression in his eyes. She tilted her head, to see him better, and he stepped closer to her.
“But you are well now?” he said.
“Yes, I’m well now,” she said.
He touched her cheek with one finger, and looked closely into her eye. “Good,” he said.
She felt the heat rise in her again. He took her chin in his hand and tipped it towards him. His hands smelled like graphite. He bent towards her and she stepped back, wishing she hadn’t.
“You are grieving still?” he said.
“It’s not that simple,” she answered.
Fred began walking again. “What was he like?” Fred said.
She looked at the scattered lilac petals on the road. “He had brown eyes and dark hair. As a boy he had this little space between his two front teeth.” She tapped her teeth and smiled.
“You knew each oth
er since you were children.”
“We grew up on neighbouring farms.”
Fred pushed his hands into his pockets and looked down as they walked.
“I’d tag after him on his expeditions. He was always hunting for treasures.”
“Treasures?”
“Stones and shells, fossils. He wanted to study geology.”
“And the farm?”
“He planned to convince his father to sell it after the war.”
“And you. What did you want to do?”
“Do? I thought I’d be his wife.” All the girls who worked in the glass factory left once they were married. Some had stayed recently because of the war but they would leave when their men returned.
“And now?”
They had reached the house and the front door swung open.
Celia, waiting for them, was wearing a new dress, blue silk–finished poplin with embroidered cuffs and buttons. “I’ve been practising Schubert’s Sonata in A Major,” she cried.
Fred looked chagrined.
“Don’t worry, the left hand of the second movement is not difficult.” Celia ushered him into the drawing room, where to Clare’s surprise, Rose was waiting, wedged into a wingback chair.
Geraldine waved Clare into the kitchen and closed the door behind her. “I hope to heaven that Rose will be able to climb the stairs back up to her room.”
“Well, it’s something that she got herself down.” Clare flopped down at the table, leaning on her elbows.
“I don’t think it’s her mother Celia’s thinking about these days,” Geraldine said with a knowing look. “Have you noticed how she has bloomed since Fred started coming to practise?”
Clare dropped her hands on the table and sat up straighter. “I thought it was the music that made her so happy.”
Dazzle Patterns Page 20