MY GRANDMOTHER PAINTED LANDSCAPES. Though she could, and occasionally did, paint from memory, more often than not she painted what she could see from the front porch. She stored her oils in the foyer closet and her painting supplies in a rusty tin can in the shed.
The one thing my Grandmother refused to do was paint from a photograph. “Flat pictures yield flat paintings,” she told me. “Only nature has any real soul.”
Whenever she tired of her front stoop’s scenery, she would pile me into her Toyota with her oil paints, canvases, sketching pencils, and brushes, and we would drive until inspiration struck her.
I didn’t paint. Not really. While she drove, I filled out books of Word Search puzzles. While she painted, I would go treasure hunting among riverside rocks, or explore fields strewn with hay bales. But every so often, I’d feel the same inspiration that struck her, and then I would stand quietly by her side and set brush to canvas.
“Clutch it like a knife,” my Grandmother instructed me, “hold the brush close to the tip. We’re not painting a fence here, we’re making art.”
I watched my Grandmother scrape the canvas with a brush crested in titanium white—a colour that slowly resolved into snow capped mountains. Then she took her middle finger and smeared the snow down the mountainside.
She stepped back, and said, “Now you.”
I reached for her paint brush, but she laughed. “After playing in the mud last Sunday, you’re afraid of a little paint?” She brought the brush down in an arc, daubed my nose in white.
That painting turned into a field of mustard rippling in the foreground, purple mountains clustered in the back, and a blue sky that canopied all. She pointed out some ripples in the sky to me and asked, “What are those?”
“Birds,” I said, remembering the flight of geese that had flown overhead. My Grandmother watched them fly by and didn’t resume her painting until they’d vanished from sight.
“Wrong. Look again.”
I did look, but I could only see birds in the picture. I shrugged.
My Grandmother pointed at the canvas. “Those are lines,” she said. “Little black lines in the sky. That’s all. But to you, and to everyone else, they’ll be birds. It’s important to leave a few puzzles for the onlooker.” Her red lips parted in a smile. “We wouldn’t want them getting bored.”
‘Nothing’ seemed to be my Grandmother’s favorite subject matter. Or, at least, I considered it to be nothing. Grey beaches. Barren hills. Snow-coated forests. Empty streets. The only exception to that rule that I ever saw was a portrait of me.
“Bullshit,” she said, when I mentioned the lack of people in her artwork. “I paint all of my grandchildren. But, of course, I gift them to each of you when I’m done. What in the world would I do with your faces?” She grinned and added, “But you’re not wrong. There’s nothing quite like nothing.”
When I told my Grandmother that I wanted to be a painter, she beamed down at me magnanimously. “Like you,” I told her. “A painter like you.” In my whole life, I don’t believe I’ve ever said anything that pleased her even half as much as those words.
Grandmother didn’t bequeath my portrait to me. Instead she hung it in the spare bedroom. “Boys your age,” she said, “don’t like to hang up gifts from their Grandmothers, and I’m not going to have my painting stowed in the garage. We’re going to hang it here until you’re old enough to appreciate how beautiful my brushstrokes are and how much skill this painting took.”
That’s what she said, but we both knew that the spare bedroom was quickly feeling like home to me. I’d permanently claimed the bottom drawer in the dresser. I kept a toothbrush in the bathroom down the hall. Impromptu visits to Grandmother’s house were becoming more and more frequent: during the summer, on weekends, after school.
Grandmother said my parents worked themselves to death. She frowned after their cars as they drove away.
Across from the portrait of me, my Grandmother hung the Mustard Field. The bright yellows and purples of the painting jumped from the wall, a splash of nothing to interrupt the eyes of the wallpaper’s owls. She called the painting a collaborative effort to justify my having it, but all I had done was run my finger through the snow.