A Sniff of Turps

The Summer School class for “Painting Portraits in Oils” attracted the innocents, the
hopefuls and the art class groupies. Among the innocents was a computer programmer who
had arrived early, joining the groupies to survey the talent and erect the collapsible easels. He
had placed his own easel squarely in front of the dais where the model would sit. A nurse,
using up her birthday gift voucher, was on his left. A tall aristocratic gentleman who later
admitted to being a paediatrician, had taken up position on his right.
The programmer’s polished wooden paint box, pristine tubes of oils and clean paint rags
categorised him clearly amongst the beginners. It was his new-year resolution to break out of
the geometric world of his computer screen, and to expand the frontiers of his comfort zone.
However, he regretted that he could not wear his straw Provencale hat (as the course was
indoors), nor would time and work considerations permit the growing of a goatee beard, but,
as he breathed in the strong smell of turpentine, he felt he was otherwise ready to become an
artist.
There were two art teachers. Drufus at least had a beard, but it was wild and bushy. He
had a PhD in physics and would explain light and colour with diagrams of bouncing
electrons, absorption and reflection. His wife Chelinay would move between the students
carrying a 3-month-old baby on her hip, dispensing hints, criticisms and encouragement, and
inspecting paints and brushes. The programmer had passed her brush-test, as he had bought
the best from Jackson’s. Not so, the nurse, with tubes from the supermarket and brushes from
the lotto lady. He lent her a titanium white and a Hog Hair No 2 and introduced himself. She
wasn’t exactly a Botticelli angel, but then fashions had changed a bit. He lent her a cadmium
red too.
The first model was a disappointment. He had not been expecting her to be completely
clothed. But it was, after all, a portraiture class. He would have to be satisfied for the day with
noses and lips, or the curve of a cheek, or a sensuous lobe of an ear. He sketched an outline.
Anything supposedly passed as art these days, but not that. He rubbed it out. Drufus was
explaining tones and hues. This was a language the programmer understood, the mechanics of
an art. He was an artist of a kind in the cyber-world but it was his first attempt at oil painting.
He learnt that he could make the model appear mono-tonal by closing his eyelids into
thin slits and peering at her through his eyelashes. He learnt that light changed its colour
depending on its environment. He tried painting what he had been taught. It was a disaster.
The model materialised childlike on his canvas, flat, distorted and in greyscales. He titled the
picture later as “Corpse by Moonlight (1998), A Frankensteinian Android”. The paediatrician
grinned. He could afford to. He was doing well. He had even achieved a rough likeness.
Maybe his knowledge of anatomy helped. The programmer tried re-positioning the corpse’s
nose, but that made it worse. Chelinay hovered.
“Don’t fiddle,” she said. Her baby burped. The programmer agreed. He could have
painted better at that age too. He placed the canvas on the floor, face to the wall at the end of
the room.
The second model was a genial old lady whose exaggerated chubbiness of face seemed to
have come from some shrinking of the underlying skull. She was like a pre-loved cabbage-
patch doll with green eyes that expressed perpetual amusement. Her tinted hair might have
been her quiet joke to see how the students painted it. Drufus demonstrated the colour wheel
and how to mix paint to match a desired point on the chart. This was magic to the
programmer. He squeezed out blues and reds and greens, offering the tubes in turn to the
nurse next door. Little blobs of paint glistened on his palette waiting to become mixed swirls
of different colours and tones that he would use in his portrait. First the middle tones to define
the eye sockets and the shadows from the nose and chin - broad impressions to be filled in
later. Then the darker tones for around the eyes, the hairline, nostrils and the creases in the
cheeks. Then the background and lighter tones for silver hair flecked with colours. The room
was silent with concentration.
 “Paint only light and shadow”, urged Chelinay as she passed. “Don’t paint features, and
above all don’t fiddle!”
He painted a green background, leaving a white hole where the old woman’s face would
be. He saw the nurse was splashing paint around her canvas in broad sweeping strokes of
purple and brown, with no need or desire for boundaries or context. It was a different scene
on his other side where the paediatrician was carefully creating disembodied shapes of single
colours as if laying out selected organs on a white sheet, which would be meticulously joined
together into a whole being at the end of an operation. He squinted through his eyelashes and
painted the shadow areas with a rich rusty red that commanded attention in front of the green.
Then he filled in the jumper with a dowdy mix of blue and grey, the hair with silver and the
flesh tones with a rich strawberry milk shake.
“Her skin colour is not that pink,” advised Drufus gently surveying his work.
“True! True! It does look somewhat odd. But, that’s how she’s going to have to be. Rust
on rose-petals will suit her!”
He filled in the white of the eyes, and traced a broken black line along the eyelashes, and
where the jumper met the neck. He placed two dots for the nostrils. A white highlight was
added to the cheeks, with just a touch more on the nose and lower lip, and suddenly features
materialised from the patterns on the canvas. He marvelled. Where was this creation coming
from. He had no idea how to paint a nose, but there it was. And those lips that made the model
30 years younger? Perhaps she had been a Botticelli angel to someone once.
The programmer next chose a fine brush, mixed a green to match those laughing eyes,
and painted three-quarter pupils beneath the upper lids. A point of black was gently placed in
the centre of each. Then some titanium white with the merest suggestion of silver, a pinhead
on the very tip of the brush, was carefully applied in a tiny dot of reflected light, right of
centre where the black met the green. Then finally he described a faint crescent of lighter
green on the opposite side of the pupil. He’d noticed this trick in the Dutch Masters exhibition
at the State Gallery a month previously. It worked! The portrait’s eyes suddenly laughed at
him, as if they shared his secret. The programmer smiled in recognition, and stood back, the
brush still poised.
“Don’t fiddle with it”, whispered Chelinay behind him.
How could he? It was finished, this painting which had used him to create itself. He had
made it, yet it was not of his conscious making. He moved, and the eyes followed him. They
followed him as he looked at the doctor’s work. It was an exquisite piece, a patchwork of
coloured facets, individually young and vibrant but together expressing the ravages of age.
The eyes watched him turn to talk to the nurse. He found he could not understand her bold
garish streaks that formed no likeness to the model, with huge symbolic oval eyes and smear
for a mouth. He was suddenly curious about this enigma. This was no Boticelli angel. And
still the eyes followed him, and laughed.
“How did you paint those eyes?” she asked, “They are excellent. They look like yours.
Except yours are brown.”
“Will you come out to supper?” he asked.
“I’d love to.”