Sunset Corner

A Story by hannahjchin

Written for a class

I scrunch my brow and squint my eyes to get a better look at the painting hanging on the wall opposite the museum bench I am kneeling on. I had been walking through the museum for an hour and my eyes had glanced briefly between pots and structures. A golden temple here, a Dali-inspired piece on the far side and a couple Picasso paintings lofted to eye level. But there it hung, looking into the room, ‘Sunset Corner’. Red, muted yellow, blue, white and black. I make my way up to the mezzanine floor to take the painting in, in its entirety. It is suspended on a far wall, an entity separate to the other collections and galleries that had been placed together. Surrounded by a white space, is a painting composed solely out of colour blocks. A deep earthy red paints the sky, covering most of the canvas in large strokes. There is no shading and no tone; the yellow strip of a beach below it is angular, jutting into the convergence of white and blue that depicts the sea. The angles push me far away from participating in the scene before my eyes.

How could someone look at a painting so crude and see within it a sunset? To associate with it beauty? The painting is so cold and silent, and that is what I feel I would feel if I tried to tell them the truth of it. Everyone knows what painting of a sunset is supposed to look like �" which is why Helen Frankenthaler should have painted cotton candy, watermelon pink clouds in a sky so pretty and fragile it took your breath away. She should have shaded layer upon layer of the beauty of the gentle closing of the sun’s eye to the world. She should have painted a landscape of mountains, jagged peaks, snowy caps, reflecting the melted golden light of the sun. Or at least the foam of the mouth of a wave on a beach. She should have used a smaller brush to create the first evening star, or mark the first tinges of dusk. At the very least, she could have thrown in a palm tree. She was doing it all wrong.

Or did I have it all wrong? Maybe I did. Not just in what I thought about Frankenthaler’s painting, but it seems I had been wrong about something much greater. Even more sobering is the fact that I may have been wrong about something infinitely more personal. You see, it wasn’t till I was much older and flicking through home videos did I see how flawed and obvious my lies to my parents were. Clips of me spilling juice on the floor and denying it was my fault, pushing my brother or sister and refusing to take responsibility or even drawing on our white cushions with my mom’s lipstick and claiming I had no idea how the marks got there. How comically easy they were to see through. And now, on the phone, as I listen to my voice on the phone as it forges its way through the lines, what I’ve strung together is falling to pieces. I wonder now, as a freshman in college, if they still can hear right through it. The tone of my voice is too chirpy, too eager; my answers are painstakingly over prepared. Yes, school is fine! Friends are good! The weather is a little on the cold side! I believe I am seamlessly able to camouflage the ugly and unacceptable and twist the malleable truth into its deviant cousin, the untruth. I answer quickly, concisely and decisively. Just like the delicate spinning of a spider’s web, so do these words flow out of my mouth, falling as the silk does, smoothly, delicately, and softly. Just as one navigates away from danger, so do I, expertly and automatically steering the conversation to much safer and much shallower waters. Oddly enough just the other day, my mom asked me if there was ‘Anything else you need to tell me?’ Not in an interrogatory manner, but in one that suggests my words have simply not said enough about anything. But I have become so well versed in answering the way I know other people expect me to, that my words just move on their own, forming a vague and hazy picture of what I think they want to hear. You see, in not speaking the truth, I am telling the truth.

I picked up my ringing mobile phone as I paced around my new room. It was days before anyone else had moved into the dorms, and it was my first night here alone, after my mom had left that morning. Tucking my newly bought Target sheets over the mattress and spreading the blanket I had brought from home over the bed was a strange sensation that caught in the back of my throat. “Hello?” It was my mom, calling from her stopover on her way back to Hong Kong.

“Are you finding everything okay?” “Yeah! I love it already!”

I really didn’t want you to leave this morning.

“Has anyone else moved in?” “No, but I’m sure they will start moving in tomorrow, but in the meantime it’s so peaceful, I’m just enjoying it.”

I am scared to be alone, this is not home, I don’t know if coming so far away was the right decision.

I venture a quick glance outside; the hall is silent, motionless and foreign. The dim amber tainted lights soak into the musty dark green carpets that line the hallway.

“Have you unpacked everything? Are you done cleaning up?” “Yeah, I’ve just about finished, everything is so tidy, it’s just like home.”

I wish her a safe flight and close my eyes as I imagine her getting farther and farther away from me, each second that goes by. The click of the phone and my sigh are synchronized. It is the beautiful, detailed, anticipated sunset that they, everyone around me expects, and so I have painted it for them again and again. But each time, even though I feel momentarily vindicated in making sure that they are reassured, each time I feel a little more deflated on the inside, like a helium balloon slowly but surely floating downwards to the ground. With each untruth I utter, each time I answer too quickly I bite back my lip and wonder why I must persist in doing this to myself. The only thing that holds back my tears is re-remembering the conversation and holding onto her voice in the same way one tries to catch the last of the sun’s warmth before it sets.

I began by not understanding this painting, ‘Sunset Corner’, Frankenthaler’s sky is too large, too obtuse and too ugly. The horizon she draws is disproportional to the dimensions of the canvas. It made no sense. She did not paint any sunset I have ever witnessed; yet somehow, with the same motion she managed to desolately condense every single sunset I have seen. The sunset is reduced to thick uneven, sometimes discoloured strokes of a muted colour. But as the sun passes through the sky, isn’t that what it does? And if we wrack our memories, isn’t that how they are all remembered in our minds? A smudge of colour draining far off in the horizon, drowning within itself only to slowly seep back up into the sky the next morning. The strokes are an attack on a canvas rather than a careful pampering of soft watercolours. No, ‘Sunset Corner’ seethes and burns through the air. The canvas breathes because she has opened it up to the world. It hangs there, in the middle of white space, a flash of colour intensely but silently stirring in that room. It fills your eyes with that sensation you get when you watch a sunset alone. It is the overwhelming combination of the curious loneliness of silence, the realization of how small you are, and the immensity of the sunset and all that is before you.

I am taken back to my last summer at home, which I remember being bathed in a golden sunlight, blue skies and the soundtrack of laughter and tears that mark the end of a chapter in my life and uncertainly welcomes in a new one. On one of my last days at home before I left to Michigan, my best friend and I made our way back to my house when we both fell into a lulled quietness. At first, I thought we were walking in that comfortable silence that only best friends can walk in. But I could almost immediately sense, that this time, the silence was heavily and uncomfortably laden with words unsaid.

She finally looked at me, tentatively, thinking of how best to say what she was trying to say without offending me or pushing me away. Her concerned eyes reached mine, look down and then her gaze firmly gripped mine.

She tells me, its okay to not be okay. She tells me it is okay to be afraid, to fail, to not be able to do something and to not have it all figured out. She tells me she knows how I try to keep it together and not let anyone know how hard it is, but I simply don’t need to. “You cannot equate telling people you have failed to them loving you less or thinking less of you.”

Suddenly as this memory ricochets in my mind, it collides rapidly and painfully with the image of ‘Sunset Corner’. I realize what is happening. And in one tumbling sentence, and through one obscure painting, it seems that my best friend’s words and Helen Frankenthaler’s art are telling me the same thing. Maybe this is what drew me to ‘Sunset Corner’ in the first place; it’s truthfulness. As I fight past the sharp lines and inquire beyond wide brush strokes that create this piece, I begin to see it, and myself, for what we really are. On the one hand, there is Helen Frankenthaler, who through this canvas has presented the truth and detached herself emotionally from the piece, giving the observer no pampering nor does she pander to their tastes. Then on the other hand, there I stand, my words and actions focused on assessing each observer and shifting tone, detail, colour to suit them, giving to them absolutely none of myself and none of my truth. Scared that if I paint the truth, people will walk right by, their eyes flickering over what I have presented, not interested enough to understand or give a second glance at what I have created and offered to them. But maybe I will try it, and maybe instead of the disappointment I have prepared myself to unflinchingly receive, someone will stop, kneel backwards on a museum bench, and watch as the truth I am finally brave enough to paint, unfolds.