Altered Perspective

Chapter Four

 

He offers to mentor her and aware of the rare opportunity she is being offered, she

 

accepts, more through duty than desire. She is a natural rebel, the one doodling and day dreaming in class. The one who never connects with teachers, who exasperates in her need for support. She is difficult in her own needy way, as if she expects others to read her mind and bring forth the help on a silver plate. She wants minimum effort and maximum result.

 

She lolls along with him. He spread out her sketches across his table, picks through them, tugging and displacing her ideas. She is almost embarrassed by their lack of meaning, sees for the first time how one dimensional they are. Drawn to pre ordained specification. There is nothing that shouts of the rage and anxiety, hope and desire coursing through her. There is nothing intimate, shocking or beautiful. They might as well be a thousand painted suns.

 

Needless to say he does not ask to see her suns, yet one day she crams them all into her folder, the paper stiff and crackling and marches them round to him. She upends them in a blinding wash of yellow, orange, red and white across his table, their vibrancy startling. Against the monochrome winter world they are a wish, a sigh of joy, they are the pictures of the future.

 

“This is what I want to do.” She jabs her finger at the pile. “I want colour, not meaning.” The words and prophecy of adolescence. Thinking of the moment not the future. She wants colour now, hasn’t a clue how she would like to sustain herself in the art world. Possibly that art world seems like a glossy, filched dream. She still finds any fate other than total wasted oblivion unthinkable. She considers herself amongst the ex art students scraping away at meaningless jobs, returning home to devote the rest of their day to art.

 

He does not encourage her, he says little, in fact, merely strokes his chin, turns a few of the sheets over. She taps her foot, an impatient habit of hers. Then he asks if she will leave them with him, so he can see how they might work.

 

Not ‘might’ she wants to say but ‘will.’

 

Lucrezia shrugs, nods and picks up her bag, making some vague excuse about another commitment. When in fact she kicks around in a fury in her room until a neighbour grows fed up of her stomping and drags her down the pub.

 

 

 

“I was wrong,” he admits, curling his hands around his glass. “There is something there.”

 

A brief smile of triumph flashes across her lips. She sits on her hands, swings her legs back and forth, feeling forever the child in his presence. She thinks of those beautiful bright round suns scattered all over his house, getting under his feet and interrupting his routines. However, the abstract of that ‘something’ sits unformed between them. Yes, they are colourful and cheerful and pretty, but what on earth can become of such primary paintings?

 

Lucrezia simply thinks of the colours, swirling around in her mind. Maybe she could branch out, paint houses and farm animals in that same simplistic way. Though she imagines the scorn of her contemporaries and secretly knows she is at a loss. She studies Rueben, he too is thinking about what direction to steer her in, she does not want to let him down. She is aware that he has backed the wrong horse in his pursuit of her, that some of her friends have talents greater and minds capable of further scope. She wonders, not for the first time, if it is a matter of herself, of her own youth that has so beguiled the grizzled older gentleman.