(Ed note: This is the second in a series by Anna Cypra Oliver. Find yesterday's post here. sdh)
DRAWING
Stephan likes to tell people that he introduced me to drawing, but that isn’t strictly true. I used to draw as a child, in the attic studio of my beloved grandfather Juan, my mother’s father and an accomplished artist, and then in college I took a course in printmaking and one in still life drawing. But the days spent with my grandfather were rare, no more than a week once a year, and the two courses, which I took out of an obscure sense of being ‘artistic,’ a family trait we all proudly traced to Juan, were separated by years. Stephan, on the other hand, made drawing an integral part of my ordinary life. One of his first gifts to me was a sketchbook and a set of pencils.
An architect who received his degree long before the advent of AutoCad and computer modeling, Stephan, who is thirty years older than I, learned to draw as part of his trade; on an early date he swept me into a bookstore that specialized in art and architecture to show me the sketchbooks of Le Corbusier, Lou Kahn, Alvaar Aalto. He himself had notebooks full of travel sketches going back to the 1960s and on our first significant vacation together, a bike trip through Burgundy, we agreed to spend part of every day sketching. We sat together in fields, perched on bicycles, at small round café tables, working with ink or watercolor, capturing town squares and distant stone villages in this slow way, immersed in the landscape, and in the air, light, and weather. This manner of travel, on a bicycle, with a pen and pad, was a revelation: never again would I wish to view a landscape through the compressing on-rush of a car window. I had to fight the desire to produce a picture-postcard, a substitute for the snapshots we were not taking, and I couldn’t, no matter how patiently Stephan explained horizon lines and vanishing points, understand perspective—my church steeples tilted down instead of up, my fence posts often advanced instead of receded—but he assured me that it didn’t matter, the wonkiness of the drawings gave them charm. More than anything, I loved the process, as well as the companionship the two of us shared.
DRAWING CONTINUED
“Loosen the pencil. Let the line flow from your hand. Hold it sideways, balanced on the pad of the thumb and the tips of two fingers, not between your index and middle fingers, as if you’re doing arithmetic. Don’t worry if the lines don’t come out quite right.” Every time I hold a pencil to draw, I hear these instructions in my head, my grandfather speaking to me across three decades from the attic studio in his house in Queens. Now as then, he leans over my shoulder, a warm presence in a suede-elbowed cardigan, his speech soft, still a little foreign despite his fifty-plus years in the United States, and deepened by a slight phlegmy rasp in the back of his throat.
Grandpa Juan was a rarity in my childhood: kind, gentle, never angry that I recall, with a teasing sense of humor, but also sophisticated, urbane, a man with a European manner (South American, actually) who could conjure a voluptuous woman in five strokes on a blank page. In all likelihood, he used fewer words, that being his nature, and showed me the position of the pencil, rather than explaining it. I was never serious enough about art to master the grip, drawing only to pass an afternoon on one of our annual visits—and to be with him in the studio—but even as a child it impressed me that the pencil position, as promised, so transformed the process: it was impossible to draw crabbed, careful lines with the implement held that way. I can still see the paper in front of me, the white sheet angled against a board on one of his upright easels, me on a high stool that swiveled on its metal base. It was a different way of being, a different mode: holding it that way said to the self, We’re making art now. The pencil, almost hidden under the fist of my hand, scattered minute flakes from its creamy point.
I know now what he was after. The lines might wobble at a crucial moment because the grip is less sure, but they are spontaneous and vibrant. The loose hand opens the door to surprise. And when, now, I don’t hold my pencil that way as I draw, when I want the lines as exact as I can make them only by holding it in the old, arithmetic-doing way, I feel as if I have to apologize to my grandfather, or defy him, knowing he is right and my recalcitrance is foolhardy.
(“No surprise in the writer,” Robert Frost famously said, “no surprise in the reader.” I’ve always loved this dictum and tried to follow it in my writing, letting association and word-play lead me where it would, inviting the unexpected into my work by gleefully following a subject or a sentence off on a seeming-tangent. I thought for years that I took the lesson from Frost, but it occurs to me now that it really came from Juan and his pencil.)
My grandfather was not a talker, but to be in his company was a profound pleasure. The awareness of him puttering in the room behind me as I concentrated on loosening my grip gave me a sense of wholeness that I had rarely experienced. He’d peer over my shoulder now and then to see how the work was coming. And sometimes he’d snatch my drawings away to prevent me from scribbling violently on them when I didn’t like how they turned out. He’d pin them in a place of honor on the cluttered corkboard lining one wall.
Even now, I smell the turpentine, oils, the dust-dry drawing paper. My brother loved to be in my grandfather’s basement workshop, among the raw boards and clamps and bits of welding solder. I loved the light through the attic’s Venetian mini-blinds.
The stairs to the attic were painted shiny black, slick underfoot. The lights came on with a dramatic snap of the switch. On tables against the large window, all my grandfather’s brushes—big glossy pompoms and sable tips as fine as eyelashes—were clumped in jars. Rulers and triangles of all sizes hung on peg board, little drawers revealed tubes of watercolor and acrylics and oils, color upon color. His paintings and drawings were stacked everywhere.
For years, I might have barely a conscious thought about my grandfather, who died in 1985, when I was sixteen, and then I pick up a pencil and he is instantly there at my elbow, leaning over my shoulder, his voice, raspy but comforting as the white stubble that turned his cheek to sandpaper, saying, Don’t hold it that way! Let it flow from the hand. Don’t worry if the lines don’t come out exactly right.
PAINTING
Work leads to work, of course, idea to other ideas. The important thing is to keep the words flowing. That was the fatal error in my literary agent’s thinking—the outlook of a businesswoman (even if her business was books) rather than an artist. The essays that she considered a waste of time would have led me to the next book. I’m sure of that now. Instead, I followed her hectoring voice down the garden path to a brick wall.
Not that I didn’t try to write. I told everyone, in defiance of the shrill bird on my shoulder, that I was working on a new book based on the lives of my maternal grandparents, Juan and Rose, but the truth was, I jumped up, thinking of other things to do, more often than I sat down to work. Then I thought of a starter set of oil paints in my closet, a set I’d bought years before but had never actually opened. Unable to gain any momentum with the story, it occurred to me that the physical act of trying to paint my grandparents might help me to explore them emotionally as characters. My grandfather, after all, was an artist, and she, my grandmother, frequently, his model.
Working from a black and white photograph taken in the 1930s, I sketched my grandmother Rose in pencil onto canvas, and then with the tip of my round brush swirled red, yellow and white together, guessing at the combination that might produce a reasonable flesh tone. Approximating from memory and other, color photographs, I painted in her brown hair, shading it toward tan where the light struck at the crown, applied small patches of pale ochre and peach to capture the variable play of light across her forehead, shadowed the three-leaf clover of her round nose with purplish gray, then swept longer strokes into my penciled outline, trying to replicate the firm full line of her heart-shaped cheeks. Impatience made me keep daubing pinkish white on her face to lighten a too-dark skin tone, but after a while the paint, as if taunting me, refused to respond: it absorbed whatever I piled on without seeming to change color at all. I had to force myself to wait for it to dry before I could try again.
The finished picture was more than a little cartoonish and flat, the tilt of the head was not quite right, the figure didn’t fill the canvas as it should, but it looked something like her. I had managed, almost, to capture the folds in her blouse, and the shadows that melded her body to the chair in which she sat. I was struck by her expression in the photograph; even staring off into the middle distance, she looked fierce rather than dreamy. She was a woman who could not or would not
dissemble her obvious smarts. Though muted by the dewy starlet set-up so typical of portraits of that era, or maybe by her youth, her intensity was apparent, too, the thoughtful demeanor of an opinionated woman. She was quick to argue, slow to back down, demanding and analytical, but sensual too, with a dancer’s uninhibited sense of her own body and a wild-side attraction to bohemia. Painting her, I thought also of Juan, who drew her often, capturing her naked or clothed, reading a book on the couch, making dinner, smoking a cigarette, her eyes always darkly intelligent, her look always intent. The drawings and paintings proved how beautiful she must have been to him, always—she with whom he, by her own admission, had little more in common than a love of art and a sexual attraction so fierce that the current continued to run between them, as swift and treacherous as spring flood, fifty years after they met, when they were two elderly people sleeping side-by-side in separate twin beds.
I never noticed before painting them how full her lips were or how flawless her skin.
.
All images Copyright © 1999 Estate of Juan and Rose Oliver
(Ed note: This is the second in a series. Find Wednesday's post here. sdh)