Paint the River 2.0

An edited verison spawned from a workshop session. A savant artist (possibly autistic) deals with his French Revolution world.

 

In the years before the French Revolution, the Ladies would sit in the parlors and embroider, and the little Grand Dukes would doodle on the floor. Philippe especially loved to paint. He’d smear the colors around the canvas, eventually affecting a sunset wash of greens and browns and grays. When he was bored, he’d paint the patterns of the wallpaper – the blue fleur de lis on warm beige. When content, he’d paint the flowers in the garden outside the large bay window. By age ten, he had started to capture the ladies at their needlework on his oilcloth surfaces. The other boys were more fun to watch certainly, throwing things and making faces. But the women sat so still that it was easier to capture their images.

            He thought the likenesses were marvelous. They reminded him of how he often saw things in his dreams, these paintings – the images of people and objects merely blurs of soundless color, splotches of bright light here and there. He showed one of these dream blurs to the Ladies once. His eldest cousin, Marguerite, had been embroidering a beautiful blood red satin with fine burgundy lace and the way the light from the window had played on it fascinated his fingers with the brush, as did the rubies around her neck. When he presented the work to her, she sniffed as she peered down her nose at it, blinking several times. Then she went back to her work, smiling politely and saying, “It’s nice, Philippe. But I didn’t think there were any red flowers in that garden just now.” He was twelve then, and his ten-year-old brother Stefan, who showed great promise his father said, had already been sent to Paris to study with a master painter. Philippe hid the painting in his armoire and didn’t use the red paint for two weeks.

           

Three years passed. The other boys now spent more time outside, riding and fencing, than they ever had doodling in the parlors. Philippe continued to sit alone and paint in the corner of the garden parlor, as the Ladies stitched away at the eternal embroidery. He painted the flowers, the wallpaper (which had been replaced because of mold by sumptuous red velvet designs), the bright sunsets over the garden hedge; but he didn’t paint the women anymore. He never painted people. They moved too much and were too complicated with all their complex features and continuous movements. A flower was much simpler, much happier. He’d refined his style over the years, adapting to the cold hard lines and shadows of reality – utilizing the light and faded pastel tones as he needed to. Only occasionally did he paint the dream pictures now, with their blurs of bright color and streaks of odd lighting.

His mother pestered him often. “Philippe, why don’t you go ride with the others? It’s a beautiful day.” She would leave her sewing to demurely walk to him and run her fingers through her youngest child’s fey hair.

“Yes, the light is perfect in the garden.” He would look up momentarily, considering the fall of a petal.

“Perhaps you could sit outside and paint then. You’re getting paler by the day.” She would consider his face from an angle, resting her hands lightly on his broadening shoulders.

“The glare would change the painting. It’s perfect from here.” Another quick glance to the window and back to his small strokes on the canvas. There would be silence for a moment as she watched him work.

Then, “Why don’t you paint something besides flowers? Stefan just sent us the finest Crucifixion scene. Have you seen it?”

He would nod and there would be a longer silence.

“Why are the flowers always red, dear?”

At this, he would stop and look his work over carefully, frowning. He would finally shrug and mix more black into the red pigment with more force than strictly necessary. She would sigh and retreat back to her needles and bland off-white lace.

It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy riding, he found it very soothing. But it was a beautiful day, and it would be a shame to waste the light. And Philippe’s mother had suggested riding with the other boys. He was not quite inclined to that, as they persisted in being immature, competitive, silly little things. He preferred to let Feutrée have her head and simply enjoy the scenery and the feeling of man and beast moving together. He’d taken the chestnut mare as his own several years before, just after she’d been broken to the bit and saddle. Most horses put up an incredible fuss during this process, but not Feutrée. She’d shied a bit at first from the strange metal and leather, but she’d never uttered a sound. The hostlers and gentlemen said it was unnatural and considered selling or just killing the mare, until Philippe threw such a fit that only a night alone in the horse’s stall could calm him. He promised her that she would never have to speak if she didn’t wish to and that she would never come to harm as long as he lived.

 

It was on one of his peaceful, solitary rides that Philippe discovered the spot by the river.  An old willow overshadowed a steep embankment. It looked as though the river had taken a sword and sliced straight down through the tight-packed soil to form the space between water and land. The fringe-like grasses played in the wind, like they were fairies dangling their bright green legs over the edge of the precipice. The willow’s trunk was a dark taupe, gnarled and thick, its drooping, cyan limbs protruding out some distance over the crystal water. The day he found the spot, the sky was made of sparse pale clouds blanketing the world in deeper tones. It had been almost dusk and he was about to turn back toward the estate, when the tree caught his eye across the distance of open field. He had not seen the river and only realized he’d heard it once he’d finally come upon it. The spot whispered his name, not the one his parents had given him – but his true name. His soul answered, “Yes. This is home.” And so it was. He was seventeen.

 

Stefan returned home a year later. Philippe’s attention wandered from his brother’s report of the growing unease in the city. The late afternoon sun was revealing vibrant cherries and russets Philippe had never before seen in the wood of his father’s mahogany desk. Later, there would be another bright, yet fuzzy dream work hiding its living reds in the dusty depths of the armoire. 

Stefan took to painting alongside his older brother in the garden parlor. Philippe watched him do sultry portraitures of their finer cousins in what he said was the style of the Renaissance masters. Philippe always wanted to shiver in the presence of these works. Their cold, harsh lines trapped the bright colors, made a mockery of the beautiful hues which should have flowed freely across the canvas. They seemed to demand recognition of some stark reality he’d never had the courage to approach. But he restrained himself from such a reaction as shivering, as it was an improper response for a young man of breeding in the presence of great art.

Philippe began to paint at the river, while Feutrée grazed nearby. It was calmer there. There weren’t any bright flowers basking in the sun. But neither were there any prim Ladies or talented, well-educated brothers to distract him. And there was deep, beautiful color everywhere. It occurred to him one day, while watching the sun set on the west bank that the garden parlor had been a bad sketch of his spot there under the Old Willow. The Ladies quiet chatter was merely a pathetic echo of the river’s babbling, rushing chorus; and the shapes of the old fleur-de-lis wallpaper merely attempted to be the patterns drawn by clouds and sky above the horizon. Even if there weren’t any flowers, the evening waters glowed red and the sun tried to reflect this in the sky, the Old Willow presiding over it all.

The paintings changed. He no longer tried to hide them, but left them strewn about his rooms against the walls, on chairs, and against table legs. The servants complained at first that they couldn’t clean; then they stopped coming. Philippe’s room became a sea of glorious oranges and reds and twilight violets, dream blurs, drifting their ambiguity around his rooms. They comforted him, reminded him of some unseen place from his future. The limbs of the willow would become arms, reaching or embracing. The fairy legs would dance along the floor across multiple canvases in varying styles, as if the winged creatures were metamorphosing or moving from one plane to another. The painted horizons not only explained the cycle of a day or a month or year, but of the mind. Sometimes a horse could even be made out against the infinite hills of saffron or jade.

And always there was the river. In every painting, recognizable or not, was silent, flowing water. Movement caught in stillness, calling, daring one to follow its course. But it couldn’t be followed past the edge of the canvas. So Philippe would return to the river and sit under the Old Willow and paint in the company of his horse.

 

Philippe was happy until the fires. He was twenty-two and his parents had given up on him. All the better, he could spend more time with his paints. Stefan was courting one of the cousins and painting portraits for money, though he didn’t need it. Their father had plenty and had recently gained favor at court. He was always away now, the care of the estate left to one of the older boys. Philippe neither knew nor cared who. He spent more time than ever at the river, sometimes riding out at dusk and returning at dawn, when his eyes could no longer stay open. He’d ride out again after a brief nap and some sustenance.

One day, he returned to the estate just after dark to a riot of light and color. Flames of bright scarlet and poppy red licked the darkening indigo sky, chased by whitest ivory and reflected in the few light puffs of gray-pink cloud that drifted serenely past the raging conflagration. He sat atop his fidgeting mount and watched the beauty burn itself out. Eventually the tiny people stopped running about, futilely trying to drown the beast. Everything grew still and the stars could be seen twinkling above the ruin of smoldering ash. Servants picked through the rubble, but no familiar family member could be seen. All gone. He must assume that. The troubles Stefan had spoken of, which his father had written home about recently, they’d reached the estate. Similar things had been happening across France.

He didn’t mind so much the loss of his things, or even the lost paintings. The gardens were gone; and the sunny parlor. The Ladies would not be missed so much, but the wallpaper and the large bay window – they were gone. He hadn’t realized he missed them until then. He hadn’t visited them in months; had not spent time there in years. But they were just two places. And they weren’t Home. The river was Home.

Philippe turned Feutrée and rode back to the river. He removed her tack and rubbed her down so that she wouldn’t chafe or catch colic by wearing the sweat drenched saddle and blanket, and her mouth would not be damaged by the continued irritation of the halter and bit. As Philippe pulled the halter down off her head, a fly buzzing about Fuetrée’s ear startled her and she jerked her head back quickly. Philippe was caught off guard, and a sharp edge on the bit tore a shallow gash across the back of his left hand. He apathetically wiped the blood away and checked carefully to make sure the dangerous bit hadn’t hurt the horse. Then he set her free to wander where she willed and painted all through that day. That night he slept nestled among the roots of the Old Willow. The next day he painted over finished canvases, rinsing his brush in the river.

Then the paint tubes began to run dry. All but the white, which he hardly used. He squeezed out as much of the remaining pigment as possible. The twilight was falling, the end of day bursting with bright beauty. He was enchanted by it as he had never been by any other. But the tubes were practically empty. He rolled them in on themselves; pinched and flattened them into wafer thin mats to get out anything he could. Then he tore them open with the spatula to get at the last possible dregs. He mixed what was left with the plentiful, horrible white. Philippe covered a canvas with the resulting pastels and grays through sharp, heavy strokes. He watered down and smeared the oils on the canvas, brushes racing across the surface. He stretched the pigments as far as they would go, until the canvas was awash in soiled grays and indistinguishable lights and shadows. It was stretched too thin, washed out. He’d lost the last of his colors.

The silhouetted branches waited quietly against a light indigo sky, the grey river slowly rolling through the mid ground. The painting sat there, staring back at Philippe as he violently cast about for a tube that might still have something left in it. He wanted – he needed. He wrapped a paint-smeared hand in his messy hair, breathing heavily and glancing at the chaos he had created around himself.

He tensed suddenly, unmoving, and staring at the canvas for long moments. The clear thought screamed through his soul. It needed more color. He jerked his head from side to side, looking around again. There was no more color.

He reached out to sift through his palates and tubes, trembling. A dark vein in his forearm caught his attention. Philippe stared at the throbbing blue just beneath his skin. He flexed and straightened his palm and fingers slowly, watching the play of blood and muscle. He turned over his hand. Across the knuckles was the long, jagged, dark red scratch, suffered the previous day in that incautious moment with Fuetrée’s tack. Finally. He’d found some beautiful color.

 

A few days later a peasant girl chased a strangely quiet horse across the fields. She stopped by a river to catch her breath. When she looked up, she spied a huge tree farther down the bank. She ran to it and came upon a painting. She’d never seen a painting before and stood staring at the strange dark red image in the center of the grayish canvas. Somehow, she didn’t think red paint was supposed to be that thick and dark. She couldn’t quite make the object out; it seemed to be floating mid-air by a darker gray tree shape.

The girl glanced toward the willow tree. A man’s boots protruded from around the wide, twisted trunk. She went to ask him about the painting. But as she came upon him, she gasped, eyes wide, and ran immediately back home to tell her mother. As she faded into the distance, a young man’s body lay cold next to the indifferent water, his faded, gray shirt soaked through with dried blood. A serene smile continued to grace his pale features long after the embers of his soul burned out. 

Author's Note

I think I still like the first one better. But I AM the author, so my opinion probably doesn't count.