We bounced along the twisting lanes in semi-darkness, and then across a field to the row of cottages on the edge of the farm where everyone would be staying for the retreat. The other cottages appeared to be empty, and after my long journey I was too exhausted to explore any further, so I collapsed straight into bed.
I yawn and check the time, and see it’s later than I’d planned and the breakfast introduction meeting must have long passed. I jump out of bed and hurry into the bathroom to shower and dress. The cottages were perhaps once two barns that have been converted into small and cosy places to stay in. Mine has two floors and two bedrooms – although I’m not sharing it with anyone as far as I can tell – and is decorated in chintzy florals. The smell of fresh lavender wafts through from the table by the door. I pull on warm clothes as despite June having arrived, the air is chilly here. Then I head outside to try to find everyone.
Even though I’m still tired, the peacefulness of the place settles over me as I walk and I experience that rare feeling that I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.
As I approach a woodland area just outside the cottage, I see five people are sitting in a circle on the grass and they all turn to look at my approach. The guy at the head of the circle stands up and offers his hand to me. ‘You must be Rose. I’m Dan,’ he says, tipping his head so his sunglasses slip down a little. Daniel Smith was a big deal in the seventies and is still considered one of our modern art greats. I shake his hand and tell him I’m grateful he fitted me in here. ‘You can thank me by being great. Now, come and join us. We’re just getting started.’ He speaks with a heavy Yorkshire accent and is wearing skinny jeans, even though he must be in his sixties by now. His T-shirt shows off the tattoos that cover most of his arms. He kind of looks like an ageing rock star and is exactly how I’d pictured him.
I’m introduced to the other four artists and realise I’m the youngest here by ten years. I sit down on the grass with them and cross my legs like they have. I’m a bit worried how William, the guy to my right, is going to get back up again as he looks about seventy.
Dan clears his throat. ‘Now we’re all here, I want to say welcome. Thank you for coming. The main reason I run a retreat each year is to help artists feel inspired again. I lost my way once. I was a struggling young artist and I fell in love with a girl who shattered my heart. How could I paint then? How could I connect with my talent again when nothing inspired me?’ He seems to look directly at me then and I shift uneasily. ‘The answer was to look into that shattered heart of mine and paint how I felt about her.’ He picks up a sketch pad and opens it to a page where he has drawn several pictures of a woman. I lean forward and recognise the woman from the print I have hanging in my cottage back home. ‘My pain inspired me. It was hard to paint her after she broke my heart but it was the best way to deal with all the hurt, and in the end helped me to move on. The reason my painting of her became my most sought-after work was people felt something when they looked at it. They understood what I was feeling. They had felt that way too. It was a shared moment between us.’ He sighs wistfully as if remembering that time. I lean forward, fascinated. I knew I could learn from this man but this is so close to what I’m going through. ‘You’re all here because you’ve become too scared to paint. You don’t feel inspired because you’re not looking in the right place. I see fear on your faces but you will only be free if you face that fear. Art is fear. Art is pain. And art is beautiful because of that.’
I hadn’t thought of it like that before. I have always played it safe with my art. And I have always been a good, but not great, artist. I want to try it this way. I want to face my fears. I just hope I’m able to take this leap.
A woman to my left who introduced herself as Pam nods in agreement. She has a blue stripe in her grey hair. ‘I’ve never had any confidence with my painting. My family always said I didn’t have any talent so I turned my back on it all, but I’m retired now and, well . . . I want to be free of this fear I have that I’m no good.’
‘You should only listen to yourself, Pam. No one gets anywhere by doing what other people tell them to do,’ Dan tells her.
Pam’s admission seems to inspire William, as he clears his throat and we all turn to look at him. ‘I’m an alcoholic. I used to think that drinking made my art better but it stopped me feeling all the difficult things that could have inspired me. I realised it was all rubbish. I wanted to have something to say again. I have been sober for two years now.’ He looks a little embarrassed but Dan starts clapping and we all join in.
Julia speaks then. She’s the closest in age to me, with lovely auburn hair and a smile that could light up the whole room – if we were indoors, of course. ‘I had a child when I was a teenager. I gave her up for adoption. My family put so much pressure on me and the father disappeared. I have always painted but I’ve never painted what I really wanted to; that’s why I wanted to come here and open up that part of my heart I’ve locked up for so many years. I have a husband now, and a family, but it still haunts me, I suppose. I’ve never been able to find her.’ She touches her heart. ‘She’s in here, though.’ She brushes at her eyes and I do the same.
Peter gives her hand a squeeze. He’s in long shorts even though it’s freezing out here, and I have to kind of admire his spirit. ‘My wife left me last year and I thought she was my muse. She has always inspired my work and I felt so . . . depleted when she left. It felt like I’d never be able to paint again, but then I got angry and I felt more inspired than I had in years. I want to feel that pain, I want to harness it and use it wisely. I need to make something good out of all this hurt, I suppose.’ He looks a little embarrassed by the venom in his voice. ‘I want to be able to forgive us both.’
I’m struck by their bravery and honesty. If nothing else, they have inspired me. So then the girl who hated reading aloud in English so much that she used to fake being sick to her mum instead of risk being called on, tells these people she’s never met before just why she’s here. ‘Someone I trusted hurt me and I feel . . . betrayed. I don’t know how to get past his lies, but I want to. I feel as if there’s so much inside of me that I want to get out, you know. But I’ve never really painted how I feel before. I’m scared that I’ll find out how I feel, and not like it.’ I realise how raw my pain over what happened with Robert is but that I also want to find a way to move past it.
‘This has been brilliant,’ Dan says, smiling at us all. ‘You’ve decided what you want to do, and during these four weeks we will make it happen.’
We all start walking back to the farm and I hang back from the others, wondering whether I can really do this.
Dan touches my arm. ‘Just put it all down on paper, darling.’
‘Darling?’
He grins. ‘You’re going to be trouble, I can see that. Come on, I think we could all do with a pub lunch, don’t you?’
The pub lunch turns into a session that stretches well into the evening. Dan persuades me to have two tequila shots and suddenly I feel like I’m on top of the world. I’m very aware that I don’t want to sink into drink as a way to numb everything that’s happened, though; I want to do what Dan led us all here to do – paint it all out. And I don’t want to wait. As we walk back to the cottages, midnight approaching, I announce loudly, and most likely slurring my words, that I’m going to start right now. Sleeping is for wimps. I stagger into my cottage and try to grab what I need, giggling as I knock my knee on the coffee table.
When I go back outside, I realise I probably should have brought a coat, but then I remember coats are for wimps too. I find a good spot on top of the hill and look out at the farm and the parkland beyond, lit only by the stars and moon above me. It’s so strange – almost eerie – not to see any artificial lights. Grass on rolling hills stretches out as far as I can see until the woods appear with their tall trees that may have stood on this spot for hundreds of years. The whole landscape is
rugged and untouched. So different to Talting, but beautiful in its own way.
Ten minutes after sitting down on the dewy grass, sketch pad open on my lap and pencil in my hand, even though it’s too dark to really see anything, Dan comes and sits down beside me. And one by one the other artists join us, no one wanting to sleep right now.
‘Usually, I’d just paint the landscape,’ I say, speaking in a whisper as it’s so quiet out here. I’m sure I hear an owl hoot in the distance.
Dan leans back on his hands. ‘Instead of painting what you’re looking at, think about what it makes you remember, what it says to your heart,’ he says, so softly I think I’m the only one who can hear him. ‘If you were trying to tell someone what this place makes you feel, what would you say? Just don’t say it, paint it. A painting is a visual story. You’re trying to make the person looking at it feel how you felt painting it.’
‘What if you don’t know how you feel, though?’
‘That’s still a feeling, honey. Confusion. Indecision. Conflict. It can all be shown on that white page in front of you. Tell it what’s in your heart.’
I nod. I know he’s right. This is what I’ve been scared to do since I first held a pencil in my hand. Bare my soul on the page. ‘What if I don’t like what’s in my heart, though? What if I don’t like how I feel?’
Dan thinks for a moment, and lifts his face to look up at the twinkling stars above us. My heart thuds painfully in my chest as I think about painting what I feel. It would be so easy to go back to painting landscapes and hiding from all the emotions circling like birds inside the deepest corner of my heart. But do I really want to keep taking the easy way out? After losing Lucas, I couldn’t paint because it all seemed so pointless when I was dealing with something so devastating. And I don’t think I can go back now. I don’t want to go back either. I want to keep moving forward. And dealing with everything I’m feeling seems like the only way I can do that.
Dan answers my question finally. ‘That’s how you know you’re feeling something worthwhile.’
Chapter Twenty-Three
The following morning, I feel more hungover than I ever have in my life. Including the morning after my twenty-first when Lucas and I did shots on the beach and were woken up by the sea lapping over our feet after passing out on the sand. I groan as I stagger out of the cottage.
Bloody tequila shots.
I walk into the main farmhouse where the others are seated at a long pine table filled with an array of breakfast foods and jugs of juice. Dan follows close behind me and we sit down. I pour myself a black coffee and put bacon, eggs and toast on my plate, needing something to bring me back into the land of the living.
‘Now I’ve checked the weather, which is something I never thought I’d do, and it’s going to be dry, so I thought we’d start our first proper day of work outside,’ Dan says, pouring himself a coffee and not touching any food. ‘I don’t do any bullshit exercises like they make you do in art school, like painting yourself as a tree or anything.’
‘Is that why you were asked to leave art school?’ Blue-streak-in-her-hair Pam asks with a smile before realising what she just said and opening her mouth in horror. Despite saying she lacks confidence in her art, she doesn’t seem to lack it in expressing her opinions, which I must say I admire. We fall into an uneasy silence, looking at Dan to see how he might react. We’ve all heard stories about some artists and their diva-like behaviour.
Dan roars with laughter, making us all instantly relax and smile. ‘Actually, yes. Art school can teach techniques but not how to be an artist. You are either born to be one or not. It’s all about your passion for the subject.’
I sip my coffee, letting his words sink in. I think back to my art teacher telling me I wasn’t putting any of myself into my work. Was I born to be an artist? Can I actually be a great one like Dan is? I’m in the best place to find out. But that doesn’t stop the butterflies begin to circle inside my stomach when I think about painting how I feel. Because to paint it, I need to examine it. I need to relive it. I need to wallow in it. And I’ve spent every single day since that terrible night desperately trying to avoid doing just that.
After breakfast, we all troop behind Dan across fields to a patch of woodland. All we have with us is our notebooks and pens. He said we need to do some planning before we can get started. He was right about the weather – it’s clear, dry and sunny, but there’s still a chilly breeze so we’re all wearing jackets.
‘I’ve never been the outdoorsy type,’ Julia confides to me as we walk into the patch of trees. Her auburn hair waves around her shoulders in the breeze. ‘My husband is always trying to get me to take the kids camping but I don’t know how I would survive,’ she says, looking nervously at the dark canopy of leaves above us.
‘I grew up in a coastal town so I’ve spent a lot of my life outdoors. Don’t you ever paint outside, then?’
She shakes her head with a shudder. ‘What about bugs?’ she asks, making me laugh.
‘Being outside always makes me feel hopeful,’ Peter says, turning around. He’s left the shorts behind today and is wearing chinos instead. ‘Whatever happens in my life, nature is always there. The seasons always come around, there is always sunshine and rain, and always things dying and being reborn. Is that corny?’
‘I like that idea,’ I tell him. ‘I’ve always been inspired by nature. Not so much lately, though.’
‘Maybe you haven’t been looking in the right place,’ he suggests.
I wonder if I’ll find the right place here.
Dan finds a clearing for us to stop in. Twigs and leaves crunch underfoot as we follow him. He lays out a blanket for us to sit on in a circle. ‘So, I always aim to have a goal on a retreat. I think creating one great piece whilst you’re here would mean this has all been worthwhile – what do you think?’ We all nod and murmur our agreement. ‘So, what will you do? I want you to paint the subject that scares you the most. This is what this retreat is about, after all – what do we fear the most? You’ve told us why you’re here but I want you to write down what you’ve been avoiding painting and how whatever it is makes you feel. Words like “angry”, “rage”, “raw”, “pain” are all excellent mood words that could spark off an idea for a painting.’ He winks at us. ‘They have done many times for me in the past.’
We lapse into silence once he’s finished speaking, each of us trying to decide what to write down. I stare down at the blank page. There is always something slightly terrifying and yet exciting about looking at a blank page. The potential for many possibilities, but also the worrying prospect of not being able to come up with anything at all at the same time.
I’m scared of so much. Of exploring that black space I lived in after Lucas died. There was so much sadness then, and anger too at him being snatched away from me like that. I lost myself at the same time as losing him.
I fear retreating back into that darkness.
Finding out who Robert was has filled me with anger again. I have been betrayed. I feel bitter at having more pain to deal with, having dealt with so much already. I opened my broken heart to him. I let him start to heal some of my pain. There was a spark of hope that I could fall in love again.
That hope seems very far away right now.
But it had been there.
I have moved away from that dark time and I don’t ever want to go back to it. I write down the mood words as Dan suggested. He walks around the group watching us as we write but I block him out. I block the world out and examine what’s inside my heart.
Fear, anger, loneliness, betrayal, uncertainty, sadness, grief.
But I force myself to also write down how I felt before Robert confessed everything and we both left Talting.
Passion. Spark. Warmth. Hope. Happiness. Light.
Two extremes. Robert and Lucas. Two sides of my heart.
An idea forms in my mind about what a painting of my heart might look like. I can’t just paint landscapes anymore. I have to paint something meaningful, something real.
I look at the light slipping through the trees and send up a message of hope, willing that everything will be okay.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Listening to LeAnn Rimes turned up loud in my cottage, I watch the rain dance against the window behind me. Curled up on the sofa with a blanket draped over me, I hold a sketch pad and pencil in my hand. Dan getting me to think about what I fear to draw was helpful. Putting all my feelings down on paper in black and white was emotional in itself. It made me acknowledge that I’ve been through life-changing pain, and I can’t hide from that anymore.
Which sounds scary as hell.
As is art.
But I want to inspire people. I feel as if I was born to be an artist, and now I need to become one.
I need to decide how to share this on canvas. I liked the abstract drawing that came out of watching Emma and John on the beach together. I bite my lip; I don’t like how I left things with them. It’s weird not being in constant contact with Emma. I want to tell her how things are going here but I’m scared she won’t want to speak to me after I walked out on her. Until I’m sure I can be the friend she needs, it’s best to stay quiet. Maybe it’ll be good for us to have this break. I wonder sometimes if I’ve been a burden on them both.
Absentmindedly, I sketch out an outline of a large heart on the sketch pad. I look at it, tapping my pencil on my knee in time with the music streaming into my ears.
I look at the outline of the heart and think about how I could convey the darkness I felt within my own. It was as if I lived in summer with Lucas and when he was taken from me, a group of trees had their leaves stripped from them by a sudden wind rushing in and ripping them away. Like summer turned to winter in an instant.
The Second Love of My Life Page 16