He smiled then, one of his rare smiles, as sad as it was sweet, but no one was there to see. There were only the stories, the tangled skein of the city's stories, waiting to be shaped by our dreams.
The Pochade Box
The essential thing in art cannot be explained.
1
— What's it like when you're dead?
— You Still dream.
2
One grey September day, Jilly Coppercorn decided to try to break herself of a bad habit she'd managed to acquire over the years. She'd been working on increasingly larger canvases, which was fine, she had no problem with that, but in the process she'd let herself get so finicky that the clarity of her work was getting bogged down with unnecessary detail. She stood back to look at the bewildering complexity of her latest work-in-progress and realized that, despite the near-perfect rendering of the individual sections, the painting as a whole made no sense whatsoever.
What was the point in developing an ideal composition, she thought, when the detailing eventually came to overwhelm the main point of interest to such an extent that it was subservient to all the fussy specifics around it? The viewer's eye, it was plain, could only become confused as it traveled about the canvas trying to find a point of reference amidst the barrage of detail. All she was going to succeed in doing with work such as this was make the viewer look away and walk over to the next piece hanging on the gallery wall, for relief.
So that day she stopped working in the studio, where the temptation to use big canvases would remain a constant niggle in the back of her head. Instead she took to painting on the street, using her pochade box as a studio. It held everything she needed: six tubes of paint for her limited palette, rag, tissues, a turp can, and a couple of brushes with the handles cut down so that they'd fit into the box. Out on the street, she could hold the box with one hand as though it were a palette, the thumb of her left hand poking up through a small hole in the bottom of the box. When the box was open, the lid formed an easel for the small six-by-eight-inch panels she painted. She used the box's tray for her palette, and, to make sure she didn't get too precious, the smallest brush she took with her was a number 8 oxhair filbert. Her only other equipment was a small drying box to carry her panels and a camp stool that folded flat and could be hung on her shoulder by its strap.
She gave herself thirty minutes per painting, working wet-in-wet, on-site, minimal sketching, minimal detail, looking for the heart of each composition, suggesting detail, not rendering it, concentrating on values and shapes. Most of her time was spent studying her subjects, really thinking through what was important and what wasn't, before she'd squeeze the first dollop of pigment onto her palette. She averaged three to four paintings a day, but quantity didn't interest her. All she was really trying to do at this point was get back to the place she'd been with her art before her preoccupation with detail had taken over.
The habits she'd fallen into were hard to break, but as September drifted into a chilly October and she was well into her second week out on the streets, she was finally making some progress. Rough though the finished pieces were, she was happy with the results she was beginning to get. The small six-by-eight panels forced her to ignore inconsequential details and concentrate instead on essentials: the larger shapes of light and dark, the broader color relationships and the overall composition. She was relearning the ability to portray a scene as a whole, rather than rendering its details piecemeal.
The afternoon she met Tommy Flood, she was sitting on her stool, trying to ignore the brisk nip in the wind as she painted the sweeping lines of St. Paul's Cathedral. She'd lucked into a cloudless day and this late in the afternoon, the light was wonderful. Bundled up against the chill, hands warming in fingerless wool gloves, she was so intent on the play of shadow and light on the cathedral's steps that she didn't realize she had company until Tommy spoke.
"Pretty," he said.
Jilly looked up and smiled at the large man who loomed above her. It was hard to place his age, but she thought he might be in his early thirties. He had the slack features of the simpleminded and returned her smile with one of his own, utterly charming and as innocent as a child's. Around his legs pressed an entourage of scruffy, but amazingly well-behaved dogs: an old black lab, one that looked like a cross between a dachshund and a collie, a couple that had a fair amount of German Shepherd in their mix and one that was mostly poodle.
"Thank you," Jilly told him. "It's not done yet."
"My name's Tommy," he said, thrusting out his hand.
He slurred his words a little when he spoke, but not enough so that Jilly had trouble following him. She laid her brush down on top of her palette. Gravely, she shook hands with him and introduced herself.
"Does it have a story?" Tommy asked as Jilly picked up her brush once more.
"What? This painting?"
"No. The box."
Jilly gave him an odd look. "Now how would you know that?" she asked.
"Everything has a story."
3
— So what do the dead dream about?
— I can't speak for others, only myself. Since my death, I've found myself existing in an odd state of mind, one that seems to lie somewhere between sleep and waking. In this place even my dreams don't seem to play fair with my sense of equilibrium. Often I feel that what I dream is real, while a moment such as this— conversing with you— is the dream.
— I think I know exactly what you mean.
— Do you now?
— I have a friend whose dreams are real— they're just real somewhere else.
— I see.
— But you haven't told me yet what it is that you dream about.
— Heaven.
— You mean like angels and the pearly gates and all?
— Hardly. Heaven was the name of the first painting I ever did which seemed to make the leap from mind to canvas without losing anything in the translation.
— So you're an artist.
— I was an artist. That was how I categorized myself, and it was through the terms of my art that I lived my life. In my present existence there appear to be only two classifications of being: the living and the dead. When you must count yourself among the latter, you soon realize that your career options are severely limited. Nonexistent, you might say.
— It sounds horrible.
— You get used to it.
— I'm an artist.
— Are you now? Well, I hope you don't let art consume your life the way I did.
— What do you mean?
— I was so single-minded in my work that the details of my life became a meaningless blur— a sfumato backdrop upon which I painted, but no longer experienced. In the end, when even my art was taken away from me, I had nothing left. I understood all too well how Monet, grieving at the death bed of his beloved wife Camille, could still find himself automatically studying the arrangement of colored gradations that death was imposing upon her lifeless features. Before he ever had the idea of recording the moment in a painting, his reflexes had involved him in memorizing the tonal succession. Blue, yellow, grey.
— Camille on Her Death Bed.