Making art in a forest of grief

 

All morning I have been painting on boxed and stretched canvases, edging paint thickly onto surfaces with a small palette knife, layering wedges of  off-white and umber and Venetian blue, masking my erratic impulses with grey or Naples yellow. I have brushes of camel hair, mongoose and squirrel, red sable, the bristles of wild boar. I have twigs for scratching and soft nubby bits of charcoal. Tubes of oils and sealed jars of lime and copper and magenta acrylics.

Landscapes come and go, shorelines napped with green water,  skies before storm, forests darkening the cleft between hills. I am painting the body,  I am shading each brush stroke with grief, the paint trickles like violet or ochre tears over hot sand, down chalky walls.

Art is such consolation, I am free to breathe and weep and ache when I stand at the easel with the raw umber of African light pouring into this makeshift studio. The little dogs’ furry backs have splashes of acrylics and watercolours like dabs of affection. My sleeves are daubed indigo and stark white. I smell of womanly sweat and turpentine and greasepaint and salty grief.

And this is both relaxation and heartwork, a kind of demanding therapy. An artist friend of mine once spent a year making art from her wounds, painting sutured flesh and scarlet lacerations like woollen thread knotting a torso, stapled incisions, blue puncture marks, necrosing ulcers, blistered lips, bruises like a violet rose.  She gave an exhibtion in a large neon-lit gallery and the spectators stood there stunned, too afraid to cover their eyes or place a protective hand over their hearts. The body flayed and split and sewn together and scarring. Unforgettable.

 

And then she boarded a plane and flew away to live in a village on the edge of the desert for a year, painted only palm trees and flamingos and ecstatic mirages of cities floating upward as if on magic carpets, rose-red ancient cities of myth, palaces of glass, towers and minarets and saucy onion domes. She had come through.