My sister paints. Really, it’s the only way she speaks with any grace. I don’t feel adequate to expressing what an honor it is to live in the presence of a visual artist, but today, I’m gonna try.
Usual as toothpaste, I breeze through the room at any given moment and she’s in the middle of some canvas, dropping wet solutions of acrylic and white glue over the rectangular drum. Tearing some unsuspecting shred of brown paper, indiscriminately swishing a hairdryer over the surface, corralling the strands of pigment.
There’s usually a scented candle. Now it’s December; there’s a Bing Crosby playlist. The candle smells like apple cider.
She’s a clean artist. Classy. Nothing like my writing table two feet away, my laptop sandwiched between my water bottle, two used Kleenex, my wallet (for no reason), my current journal turned face down with a dollar store pen in top, an abandoned Apple Pencil underneath a tape measure, next to my hair clips and a china doll from Goodwill, tiny scissors, and two fat quarters…half a drafted pattern…my grandma’s crochet hook case. A coaster Kezia made for me (my water bottle is not on it; the coaster’s for tea cups, which this morning I found crusted with egg nog from the night before). An old paper bill from the ophthalmologist. The Kleenex box. My laptop sits on top of a three-ring binder containing about 65 slices of lined paper because I don’t like the way the laptop teeters side to side over the fold in the middle of the table while I’m typing.
This is all temporary.
Well, that’s what we’re saying right now, but we both know that no one knows how long temporary is. We were both disenfranchised from our “normal” lives by the COVID-19 economic fallout. And here we are. Together. Sometimes we don’t talk. Sometimes it’s ’cause we can’t stand each other, and sometimes it’s because
…she’s covering a large blue-black canvas with rows of lilac finger prints.
That canvas hung on the wall for two months until a few days ago, when she finally layered it with three enormous, primitive splatters that look like that Heptapod language in Arrival. It’s back on the wall, now. I can’t tell if it’s finished.
It’s like us.
The middle of art is a privilege to witness. Messy, stupid, sentimental, unrefined, and uncertain…the patron buys it, but never sees it. Like all the things she can’t figure out how to say — I just contemplate the middle stages of her paintings.
It’s eloquent enough for me.
Art: detail from a work in progress by Kezia Carter