3rd Prize – Sherri Turner with:

Portrait of the Artist

The first stroke reached from her navel to her left hip, a broad uneven band of cerulean blue. A carmine dot, no bigger than a pea, followed, placed with care just above her right nipple. Jane leaned back, the spray of brushes in her hand forming a peacock’s tail of colour. She considered her canvas, chose a fine sable rigger and dipped it in her water pot, then softly agitated a bead of cadmium yellow before tracing a delicate swirl around the woman’s collar bone.

“Did you wear a polo neck?” Jane asked.

“Yes,” the canvas replied. “When can I start the interview?”

Jane began a series of small lines and flecks in forest green and magenta in the hollow of the woman’s throat.

“Not yet. I’ll tell you when.”

The call had been unexpected and unwelcome. Jane didn’t advertise or give interviews and it was a condition that formed an important part of the contract that her canvasses never spoke of what happened in her studio. But the woman had been persistent and had suggested that she could always run the article without Jane’s cooperation if she were to prove difficult. Jane had bristled at the transparent attempt to intimidate. She had offered to show her some of her other work instead, the pieces that sold in the galleries and paid her bills, and had been brushed aside.

“I’ve seen those. They don’t interest me.”

They didn’t interest Jane, either.

“Very well,” Jane had said, “but it will be on my terms and there will be conditions.”

“Of course,” the woman had agreed.

Jane ended the call and allowed herself a rare smile. The woman hadn’t understood at all. She would learn.

“Turn to the side.”

A hand on her shoulder indicated the direction in which she should turn and she yielded to its pressure.

“Lift your arm.”

A puddle of burnt sienna soaked into the large flat brush and Jane applied the paint to the journalist’s armpit in brisk dabs.

“That tickles!”
Jane ignored the comment.

“You can start now,” she said.

“I need my notebook.”

“No.”

“Recorder?”

“No.”

“It’ll be harder for me to be accurate if I have to remember everything.”

“It won’t hurt you.”

“Right. Well, then, could you tell me when this all started? Where the idea came from?”

“Jane, could you stay behind, please? I need you.”

Jane turned in the doorway, her sketchpad and pencil case lodged beneath her arm.
“Need me? Yes, of course. How can I help?”

Adam gestured to a chair near his easel and she sat down.

“There’s something I wanted to try and I need a model. I noticed your hands. They’re very elegant.” Adam took her left hand in his and gently turned it to the light. “Do you play the piano? You have the fingers for it.”

Jane watched as Adam lifted her hand closer to his face and examined it, slowly, digit by digit. He ran his thumb along her life line, then pressed his palm against hers.

“Look,” he said. “They’re almost as long as mine.”

He placed her hand on the edge of a table, arching her fingers as though to make a rest for a snooker cue and reached for his paints. Loading a brush with colour he ran a line of Prussian blue along Jane’s knuckles. She started.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have warned you. Can I go on?”

Jane nodded, wondering where all the air had gone.

When Adam had finished he repeated his previous scrutiny.

“It’s a different hand,” he said. “It isn’t just yours any more. It’s mine, too. I’ve changed it. You can wash that off now.”

As the paints merged into a brown sludge and swirled away Jane spread her fingers and studied each one. She could still see the colours that had transformed her hand, like a veil over her skin, and knew that they would remain forever.

Jane drew an arc of viridian below the burnt sienna, letting the colours bleed together at the join.

“It was a long time ago,” she said, “at college. It was just an experiment. Artists like to try new things.”

“Nothing more than that?”

“No.”

“What do the patterns represent?”

“They mean whatever you want them to mean.”

“And what do they mean to you?”

It was cool in Adam’s studio and Jane tried not to shiver as the water evaporated from a patch of rose madder on her lower back. Although he painted in silence, the strokes of the brush formed words that Jane could hear as a whisper in his smooth low voice.

Delight, she had heard as the reddish pink had been laid down.

Beauty, for violet.

Joy, pleasure, love, forever, ecstasy.

She could discern the hue from the words and feel the shapes from the sensation of the brushes kissing her skin.

When she was complete and Adam made love to her, her painted body convulsed in waves of vermilion and ultramarine.

Jane let the cobalt blue meander along its own path, trickling down past the waist.
“They don’t mean anything. It’s abstract.”

“But even abstract art has a meaning, doesn’t it? To the artist? A representation of something through the artist’s eyes? An emotion?”

“They’re just patterns.”

The interviewer sighed.

“You’re not giving me much to work with here. My readers want to know the details. They want something they can think about, get their teeth into.”

“I haven’t got anything else to give. Turn.”

She turned.

“Okay, let’s try another one. How do you find your models? Why do you choose them?”

The girl was naked, clothed only in paint, her arms spread like a glorious butterfly. Adam was applying a stripe of yellow ochre to the curve of her left buttock. Jane felt all of the colour flow from her and pool around her feet in a muddy lake.

“It’s just a canvas,” Adam said. “The canvas doesn’t matter.”

“But my hands... You said about my hands.”

“The canvas doesn’t matter,” he repeated, and turned his back.

“The canvas doesn’t matter,” said Jane.

“So you could choose anybody?”

“Yes. Anybody at all.”

“No favourites?”

“No.”

“And only women.”

“Yes.”

“Do you ever paint the same person more than once?”

“No. Only once.”

“And no-one sees the work except you.”

“Me and the canvas.”

“So you take a day, you cover a woman in paint and you insist that she shows no-one and washes it off the same night. What’s the point?”

“It changes them forever.”

“How?”

“You’ll see.”

The journalist shrugged.

“And how do you feel that one of your ‘canvasses’ spoke to me about it?”

“Surprised. Disappointed. It hasn’t happened before.”

“So the magic transformation isn’t infallible, then?”

“Clearly not. We all make mistakes.”

“And what’s in it for you?”

Jane arranged her brushes and ordered the paints next to her palette: cerulean blue, carmine, cadmium yellow, forest green, magenta, burnt sienna, viridian, cobalt, rose madder, yellow ochre. She squeezed out a small pearl of the blue and slaked it with water. Taking a wide soft sable, she mixed the pigment and touched the brush to her own navel, dragging it downwards to her left hip. She rinsed the bristles and picked up the tube of carmine. She thought she could remember everything.

When she had finished and was dry she examined herself, then dressed in trousers and a polo neck sweater and went outside. People strolled down the street in clothes of every hue. There were cars and advertising hoardings. Everywhere she looked there was colour; a polychromatic landscape of life. Jane could feel the swathe of grey that she cut through it as she walked. Something was wrong. She must have done something wrong. She thought she had remembered everything.

Returning to the studio, she removed her clothes and slowly sponged her body. She would try again tomorrow.

The journalist repeated her question.

“I said, what’s in it for you?”

“It’s just what I do.”

Jane added water to the yellow ochre and blended it with her brush. She made her final stroke and stepped back.

“You’re finished now.”

“Oh. Is that the end of the interview then?”

“Yes. You can get dressed.”

“Well, I haven’t got much to write about. I must say I was expecting more. I... Oh!”
Jane had removed the dustsheet that had covered the mirror and a magnificent bird now rose from the glass, a creature of wonder and fantasy, an exquisite beast. Its mosaic wings shimmered as the journalist moved her arms, testing the image, examining the intricacies of the fabulous being reflected before her. All of her desires and ambitions were embodied there: the book she would write; the loves she would have; everything she could be.

“That can’t be me,” she said.

“It is,” said Jane, “and now it always will be.”

The journalist dressed quietly, polo neck sweater and trousers to cover all of the paint.

“She didn’t want to talk,” she said as she left, “the other canvas. She didn’t let you down. I saw the paint, over her collar. I made her tell me.”

“Ah. I thought so. Thank you.”

Jane didn’t ask her when the piece would run. There would be no article, not now that she understood.

Jane tidied her paints and cleaned her brushes in the sink, rubbing carefully around the ferrules until they were pristine, then shook out the excess water, reshaped the bristles with her fingers and arranged them next to the ordered tubes. Practice was done for today. It was her time now, time to search for the colour she had lost, another chance to get it right. She undressed, took the first brush and began to mix the cerulean blue.

Sherri Turner was brought up in Cornwall and now lives in Surrey with her husband. She has had numerous short stories published in women’s magazines in the UK and has been placed or shortlisted in competitions for both poetry and short stories, including a commendation in the 2009 Yeovil Prize, a shortlisting in the 2010 Bristol Prize and a commendation in the 2010 New Writer prize. Her work has also appeared in a number of short story anthologies.