That was what he was here to find out.
* * *
By Wednesday his temporary studio was laid out and ready to go. David was not. This wasn’t procrastination—he was wearily familiar with that pissy little demon, alert to its polymorphic disguises and insidious creep. The need to detox from the city and the last year’s inactivity, coupled with a desire to explore, seemed a reasonable excuse to postpone sequestering himself on such beautiful fall days.
Carmel is an extremely attractive place to stroll around. It’s the first (and rather small) town north of the wilderness of Big Sur, on a ruggedly stunning stretch of coast. There is a craggy cove with a beach, and a great many cypress and eucalyptus and pine trees up and down the narrow streets, at times giving the impression of a village built in a forest. What is most noticeable, however, is the houses.
There are few large dwellings in Carmel—the mansions start further north, on 17 Mile Drive and Pebble Beach and the outskirts of Pacific Grove. Carmel is a collection of cottages, as cute as can be—from perfect little Victorians to jewel-like Gothic and Mission and playful Storybook and Folk Tudor, all cheek-by-jowl, with nothing but narrow strips of intensely manicured garden in between. You wander the streets constantly struck by the dreamlike juxtaposition of styles, stopping to gaze upon one house before realising its neighbour is even more striking, and walking on a few yards to look at it, before having the same realisation about the next dwelling along.
And thus, for David, a few hours would happily pass, and whole mornings and afternoons.
It’s a small place—ten streets in one direction, twelve in the other, made cosy and intimate by all the trees, and whichever way you walk you’ll get to the centre before long. It’s here that (should you somehow have remained in doubt) it becomes clear that Carmel is a place for the wealthy. The centre is quiet and serene, dominated by the sound of birds, the purring of expensive automobiles, the polite chink of silverware. There’s an immaculate little bookstore. Patio restaurants, where waiters in white aprons deliver high-spec food and perfectly chilled glasses of local wines to sunglassed patrons in chinos or dresses in muted shades. A charming grocery market. A few coffee houses—mostly hidden down alleys, as if to make the point there are some people who truly live in this paradise, and everyone else is merely a tourist passing through. No Starbucks, God forbid.
And, of course, there are the galleries.
The art wasn’t all bad, either. Usually it’s axiomatic that the closer a gallery stands to the ocean, the worse its contents will be. The galleries of Carmel are not for enthusiastic amateurs hawking garish sunsets, however. From earliest days the village had been a Mecca for painters who could actually paint, along with poets, writers and free-thinkers of every stripe (though few such could dream of affording to live there now). There’s aesthetically lamentable work on sale, naturally—ominously perfect farmhouses in narcotically bucolic country scenes, anthropomorphised dogs, excessively winsome little girls in ballet outfits—but also plenty of serious stores specialising in admirable California painters of the last hundred years, and plenty of contemporary artists who know what they’re doing, too, and are capable of keeping on doing it.
Unlike, it might appear, David.
His intention had been to avoid the galleries, in order to avoid provoking the acid churning in the guts that comes from experiencing the work of others, while in the throes of personal non-productivity. This didn’t last, and he told himself it was to remind himself that canvases did get finished, and hung up, and bought.
As had David’s, though not recently. Five years ago he could expect to earn ten to fifteen thousand dollars for a painting, less a gallery’s draconian cut, naturally. Then two years ago he’d hit the wall. He’d start work, get as far as blocking out… but a week later realise that he’d never gone back to it. Soon this gap extended to a month, or two, and eventually it got to the point where he’d conceive of a painting and be able to imagine exactly how it might progress, and as a result feel disinclined to even start—knowing it’d be okay, but that there was no real need for it; believing that if he failed to create it, nothing of substance would be lost to the world.
Except, as his bank and other creditors eventually started to remind him, it paid for everything. This information did not help.
It broke the chain.
* * *
Finally, on the Friday afternoon, he went into his temporary studio. He put up a canvas. He lifted a 2B pencil from where he’d placed it in readiness, and quickly outlined some shapes. After ten minutes he pulled the iPhone out of his pocket and consulted a shot he’d taken that lunchtime, in the tiny courtyard of a coffee house hidden in the centre of the village. He put the phone back in his pocket—even when working from reference he needed to feel he worked from memory too—and made minor alterations.
He stood back, looked at what he’d done. It seemed okay. He put the pencil back in its place and walked into the house and had a shower.
* * *
On Saturday morning he found himself back at the same coffee shop. He sat at the same rickety metal table in the courtyard, watching the light on the opposite wall. The wall was more or less white, the kind of white you see on an exterior surface that was painted white a year or two ago, on top of a previous coat of white, and has since then experienced sun, shade, and only very occasional rain.
To the incurious eye, it looked… white. David’s was not an incurious eye, and the wall was what he was hoping to portray. His additions would be shadows. His last successful series of works had involved placing shadows of people on largely featureless walls. A woman sitting, a man standing. A couple together. A suggestion of content through absence. He’d stopped wanting to paint these things, but now he was finding that he did again.
He sat for two hours, drinking three coffees. Usually he’d have one in the course of a morning, two at the most. The brew at Bonnie’s was good, though. It had a nutty flavour, a little smoky. While he sat, he eavesdropped and observed a sequence of locals as they passed through, stopping to chat at the other tables. There was talk of planned or recent trips to Europe, the pleasures of a newly acquired boat, upcoming IPOs in Silicon Valley. This was not the kind of content he wished to suggest.
He left and went back to his temporary studio, where he worked all afternoon. It felt good, and as always when it felt good he was baffled why he didn’t do this all the time, springing out of bed in the mornings and getting straight to it. Each stroke of the brush seemed to flow from the previous and into the next, urging forward. So why did the chain fall apart so often? Why did it fragment into a series of dull, rusty links that seemed impossible to join together?
Rather than worry at the problem—David did not want to bring activity upon himself by thinking about it, however constructively—he kept working, for once going beyond outlining and starting to actually paint. This wasn’t his process, but maybe this was a good thing. Maybe the process itself was flawed. If there’s one thing he’d learned over the years it was that if something’s working, you keep doing it. Don’t question, don’t second-guess. If you decide later that you don’t like what you’ve done, you can fix it. But you’ve got to have done something first.