Crow’s Breath

FARM SCENES

I paint farm scenes, he told the young lady from the regional newspaper. It was more than he could bear, really, but it was good publicity and work had been scarce.

No, no, I’ve been here for over thirty years now. I’m not a recent arrival! The woman was clearly a new arrival herself, maybe from a journalism course at one of the city universities. I’ve painted hundreds of farmhouses, barns, paddocks, fences … farm animals.

I take my paints and easel out to my patrons’ properties. They pay me to paint their places. I paint en plein air. I paint in the open air, weather permitting. I finish things off in my studio here. But sometimes I just paint what I see around me; samples are in the window. Tourists buy them.

I call it an honest style. I paint it as I see it. People out here don’t like frills. They don’t want a photo, they want atmosphere, but they also want it to look like the place they know. It’s all about the light.

He’d picked up a few commissions from that newspaper article. It wasn’t much of a piece, but it did include a photo of his shop window, and he’d had one of his signature paintings on display – a favourite from ten years ago. One of the district mansions and surrounding sheds and yards. It was actually a near copy of one he’d done for the family. He’d liked his effort so much, he’d repainted it later.

His studio was down by the river. On the rare occasions that the river flooded, he would have to remove all his canvases, paints and sketchbooks, and take them upstairs to his living area. It was cramped in there, but he didn’t mind living with his work, even closer than usual. He could always smell the fumes of the oil paints and linseed and cleaning fluids rising from the studio up through the wooden floorboards, even when things were well. It was a historic building. He had painted it dozens of times. A painting of it hung over his bed, which was lonely since his wife’s death. She’d been a schoolteacher. He wasn’t interested in a new partner, though women his own age were often hanging about the studio … he gave the occasional lesson when business was slack. But he was never known to exploit his students.

Business wasn’t what it once had been. A few young people visiting his studio – tourists, really – told him his ‘style’ was really quaint, meaning outmoded. If he deigned to reply, he would say, Art isn’t about being fashionable. Still, business had dropped off.

So those new commissions were welcome. He would never intimate, nor in fact show the slightest sign of negativity, but found the ‘servicing’ of the town’s amateur painters tedious. He felt, well, demeaned. What a waste of an artist, he brooded over his glass of white in the evening. A white-faced heron stalked the green river’s edge in the half-light below the window. His window frame was a living painting, an embodiment of his own ‘style’. My paintings capture something for all time, and show the movement of place. A moment, and movement. That’s my gift. He didn’t suffer from depression, he assured himself, but the ignorance and crassness of the modern world did depress him. But he kept that to himself.

Once such a view would have gained the approval of farmers for miles around, who reinforced their inherited colonial possessions with furniture made to look ‘olden’ and ‘rural’. But it was different now. Tractors guided by satellites, genetic modification, houses built from ‘new materials’. The farm scenes he was asked to paint were often more like factory scenes, or decorations for business cards. All that was left of the ‘old’ was the nostalgic, and he had to admit his paintings were tending to fall into that trap. New places, all business, but with a desire on the owners’ part to show the new with ‘ye olde-worlde charm’. He knew what they wanted and he dished it up in buckets. His first couple of commissions via the novice journalist’s country stint were like this.

Then there were the hobby farmers dripping with dough who wanted their weekender painted, so they could hang the paintings in city lounge rooms or offices, to remind themselves they had weekends to look forward to. He had done plenty of those over the years. The hard-up smallholder didn’t have the money to commission the artist, nor the interest – a photo would do! But the pretend farmers needed to convince themselves they were rural, and he was more than happy to assist.

The last of these commissions was different. For starters, it was for a younger couple. They were what one might term ‘alternative’. They had rings through their noses and many studs in their ears; they were decorated with tattoos. Okay, he’d seen plenty of that, but not running a huge property out beyond his usual range, and with committed ecological politics. They were farming organic wheat on a commercial scale. After agreeing to take the commission and ‘live in’ for a couple of weeks, he found that they’d once been members of an influential rock band. The woman had inherited the farm, which they’d ‘converted’. They wanted a series of paintings capturing the ‘essence’ of what they were doing.

I’ll do most of the work here and touch up in the studio.

Do you mind people looking over your shoulder every now and again?

Not a problem – I’m used to it, though I will probably ignore any ‘advice’. Everyone had advice for painters. As the contract says, You’ve agreed to accept the outcome done in good faith.

No worries. So when did you start painting? Gemma asked.

When I was a child. I did it at school, but because I had to work on the farm for my father, I learnt by correspondence after that. No fancy art schools for me. And we lost the farm, so I went ‘commercial’. Mind you, those courses are all about commercial anyway. And you were in a rock band! Sorry, I’m embarrassing myself. You’re probably very famous.

Well, we were notorious. If you google us you’ll read more about our drug … ex-drug habits than our music. And our fights. Our break-ups. Our behaviour … It’s a long time ago.

But you’re still so young!

Long time ago in rock-music terms. A few years. This is a better life.

Oh, and I don’t google.

She was looking over his shoulder. He could feel her breath. Smell her through the dry of the stubbled paddocks. He could see her face through the back of his head: all that metal. And young as she was, you couldn’t say she looked ‘fresh’. His mother would have described her as looking like a mile of bad road. But she was interesting. She exuded something. His brush faltered. Damn!

Sorry, am I disturbing you?

Not, not at all. I am used to people watching.

And giving advice.

I like the light effect on the shed roof.

It’s all about the light.

He repaired a slight error and persisted with the machine shed roof. He found himself playing up the light effect more than he’d intended. For her? He was usually immune to flattery, to judgement … to anything but his own vision, while he painted. It went on like this for ten minutes.

It’s getting warm, she said. How can you stand being out in the sun all day?

Lots of sunscreen, loose clothes, a broad-brimmed hat. And then he was thinking about the music they’d played after dinner. So that’s the kind of music you played? Composed. I like it … it’s not really my thing, but I can hear that it’s good. It’s the Mahler in me that responds to it. It has a grandeur and a finesse at once. It is so modern, yet there’s something classical about it too. And Gemma, that’s some voice you have. You could have been an operatic contralto. You are a contralto. Yes, sorry. I just meant you could have sung opera. And Reg, you play that electric guitar like Django.

He’d had a few wines, and felt Reg and Gemma thought him … well, the only word he could come up with out of his own youth was ‘square’. He’d squirmed a little, but had actually been having too much fun to let it ruin his night. And they’d spoken about farming organic wheat, and about making flour, and a little about painting. Their tastes were clearly ‘postmodern’, judging from the pieces throughout the house. There was a lot of pop art. Copies of Warhols. Actually, that one’s an original print … Gee. Can’t say I like it, but he was a good commercial artist. Reg had twitched his nose ring, ever so slightly. Gemma had rubbed one of her tooled-leather cowboy boots against the other. He’d felt that Gemma and Reg were discussing him through twitches and looks and silences. Then with a light, throw-away warmth, Gemma had saved them all again: Well, we had our fifteen minutes …

Now she broke into his reminiscing. Your shed looks so much like our shed.

What do you mean?

Well, it doesn’t really have to look like a shed to be a shed, does it?

He wondered if this was a question, a statement or an answer, before saying, Well, it’s a scene I’m painting, that’s what I do. He shifted uncomfortably on his seat, and pulled away from the canvas.

I am disturbing you, sorry!

Well, a little. I thought you wanted me to paint in my style: the style you saw in the picture in the paper.

That’s true, but talking with you, and being with you (did she move closer?), I realise now that anything is possible. You could take the next step.

He bristled. The next step? He started to feel the heat of the day and thought, Maybe that’s enough. Back in the morning. He’d work in the shade now, on a different scene – one from the verandah, of the rainwater tanks with the paddocks spreading out towards the hills behind. But she’d make the same comment. It had been said. He felt it would be said when he lay down in his bed at a distant end of the colonial mansion with its modern furniture and paintings, with its banana-shaped lounges, glass tables and state-of-the-art stereo. There was even a cellar that had been turned into a recording studio. They’d let him poke his head in there. Falling asleep, he’d half-thought he was like some kind of transitional object for them. An old farm-scene painter who would be gently dragged (barely screaming and kicking) into their alluring modern world.

He stared through the front window of his shop, into the nothingness of town. The river was almost empty, so there was no comfort in the flow of water over rocks filling in the background. He looked circumspectly at his new work in the shop window. A copy he’d executed with disturbing precision. It would stay there, though it had become a running joke around town. For the first few weeks people had stood and laughed, outright laughed in the street. A few of his old friends had invited him over for dinners, where he knew over dessert and port they’d broach ‘the subject’. Was he alright? The women thought he might be having a late midlife crisis. They’d stopped coming for lessons, their husbands worried about their safety. That mess in the window, with its confusion of lights and sheds and distorted animals, seemed predatory. Actually, the husbands had never liked him – that arty stuff their wives distracted themselves with. Their hobbies.

But eventually the women did return. They’re seeping back, he told himself. Broke, even with the hefty commission he’d received from Gem and Reg, he gradually went back to teaching in his earlier style. He no longer painted, himself. My painting days are over, he said in answer to those rare enquiries that came in from outside the region. No one within cooee bothered to ask these days. Painted farm scenes had kicked one last time, and then passed away. Satellite images, blown up to almost wall-size, came into fashion. Fashion without confusion. And he removed the painting from the front of the shop, being the weak man he was, but he never replaced it with another. He hung it in his bedroom, where he’d often fall into bed after too many wines, and stare in wonder; its breath over his shoulder as he slept deep, empty, lightless sleeps.