Ivory by Steve Merrifield Read Free Book Online Page A

speak its
name from my art rooms and find a more appropriate venue.”
    Hadleigh
looked awkward then frustrated and then disappeared through the
door. Martin heard Hadleigh’s angry tone but not the words that
Hadleigh used to chastise his boy.
    Martin
experienced a confusion of emotions; satisfaction at having seen
Hadleigh embarrassed, the resurfacing of anger toward him for
changing his medium, guilt at having such feelings for someone he
had admired and liked for such a long time, and mournful for the
breakdown of their relationship. The feelings pulled him in too
many directions so he ignored them and returned to his sketch pad.
He sat back down took up his pencil and closed his eyes once
again.
    It was no use.
He felt dirty inside his body and his mind was busy. He slouched
over his belly and stared at the white page and the single charcoal
grey line he had managed to produce before he had been interrupted.
The line was around seven or eight inches long, started and ended
with a distinct curve and wavered in between. It was the side of a
face and the curve of a forehead, the depression of an eye socket,
the swell of a cheek bone, the gradual decent of a jaw into the
curl of a chin.
    Martin blocked
the image in his mind and worked the pencil across the page, with a
few fluid lines the face was framed by a fall of long hair, a
couple of quick flicks of his pencil and he had the suggestion of a
mouth and a nose, and with some careful touches the face was given
eyes. He applied shading to the face and gave her flesh and
texture. He pressed harder as he began to detail the eyes, and that
was when he recognised who he was channelling. It was Ivory.
    He expanded
the dark of the pupils and the sketch began to look increasingly
unnatural. The eyes played such an important role in any portrait,
the compliment of light and detail had to be right, and their gaze
had to have the appropriate character. If there were too much
detail the eyes would dominate, while too little attention would
cause the face to change and the focus for the portrait would be
lost. Likenesses were made with the eyes and if there were any
detail missing a portrait would lose something of it’s identity and
it would become a doppelganger staring back with an unnerving tell
of it’s deception.
    He filled one
whole eye with graphite, relieving his pressure on the pencil when
he required a softer shade of grey to suggest the change of light
on the curve of the eye, leaving spots of paper completely to
create glittering dapples of white light. It didn’t look right.
    Martin flipped
the sheet to the back of the pad and started again. Almost
immediately his pencil took the wrong path and he was unable to
capture the contour of the face that he had created earlier. After
several false starts he decided to work on the eyes alone, being
able to create solid black eyes that looked natural was a unique
challenge. He had hoped that by recreating her eyes they might lead
him into recreating the rest of her face, but no matter how much
reflected light he put in them they always left his attempts at her
face looking like hollow masks. Creating eyeless beauties or vamps
that might best dominate the cover of a pulp horror novel. The more
he worked the pencil the further she seemed to fade from his memory
and became more difficult to capture on the page.
    After an hour
and eight pages of abandoned sketches he had something reminiscent
of the face he could picture in his mind. It was one face among
many others that had ended up being strangers. He tore the quarter
of the page from the pad and pinned it to the corner of the large
easel set in the cupboard.
    He turned the
pencil on the canvas and began to create an enlarged version of her
face. A sense of proportion and scale for copying enlarging and
reducing images came naturally to him, but was strangely evading
him in this task and actually became something he had to work at.
After what felt like a frustrating return to