The Ecliptic by Benjamin Wood Read Free Book Online Page B

place I
had forgotten, the outer one—broke into road noise and tenement din. Neighbours were squabbling in the close, coming out into the yard with dustpans of ash, telling young lads with footballs
to clear off their landings. An early dark was settling and I heard my mother at the window, already home from work. She was calling me. And so I lifted my head to see what I had finished.
    There it was upon the wall, drying: a semi-abstract thing, made in a flurry. The suggestion of a place I had never been to. A spray of rain. A slate-grey ocean spattered by bombs. The remnants
of a foundry, dismembered in the sky. A falling road bridge, or perhaps a wall, and so much else I did not recognise, which somehow conveyed more in its obliqueness than I could ever have spoken in
words.
    When my mother came down into the backcourt and saw what I had done, she must have glimpsed my future in it like bad runes. ‘Whitsat?’ she said. ‘Did
ye
dae
that?’ She chided me for wasting a full day on a silly picture and told me to clean her good icing knife. There were better uses for my time, plenty of errands I could do for her. But I spent
the next day working on another painting, and the next, and the next, and did not care about the punishments that came after.
    Whatever happened to this backcourt spirit? When exactly did it leave me?
    I had always wanted more than my parents’ life and its routineness, but I did not take my education seriously enough, and my Leaving Certificate showed only the barest of passes in English
and history, ruining any aspirations I might have had to become a teacher. Still, I could not settle for a job in the Singer factory or the biscuit warehouse, as my father had ordained. The
afterglow of painting prodded me awake at night, urged me to submit an application to the Glasgow School of Art, told me I could conquer anything if I just applied myself. At the admissions
interview, the registrar studied my portfolio and said, ‘Your work is naïve. It leans too much towards abstraction for abstraction’s sake. But it has more intensity than one
normally finds in a woman’s painting, and you are still very young. Of course, you won’t be trained in oils until third year—that ought to correct the bad habits you’ve
developed.’ A week later, he wrote to offer me a scholarship:
We truly hope you’ll accept
, the letter signed off, as though I had other choices.
    By October, I found myself in colour theory lectures, attending slideshows on the canon; in drawing classes, idly sketching vegetable arrangements; in cold studios, measuring the proportions of
nude models against a 2B pencil. My parents’ tenement seemed so far away, and I feared that the ‘intensity’ of my work was being dulled—normalised—by too much
refinement of technique. In fact, this attention I paid to the rudiments of drawing and the methods of the Old Masters only heightened my appetite for painting. I made discoveries in these classes
that I did not expect: how to imply the mood of a body with a sweep of Conté crayon, how broader narratives could be revealed through compositional decisions. My backcourt spirit survived in
all the paintings I made in this period, though my early tutors did not reward it.
    It was in the mural department, under the tutelage of Henry Holden, that I began to thrive. I was inspired by the grand traditions of mural painting: from the ice-age pictures in the caves of
Lascaux, to the mosaicked churches of Ravenna and Byzantium, the frescos of Giotto, Tintoretto, Michelangelo, Delacroix, and the great political gut-shots of Rivera. In Holden’s tutorials, I
felt energised and unhindered. He was a rangy old socialist in half-moon glasses, who gave us curious monthly assignments:
Devise a scene for the ballroom of the Titanic.
(For this, I
painted a ballet of furnace-room labourers in cloth caps, dancing with wheelbarrows of coal, and was marked down for ‘discounting context’.)
Paint