The Underpainter by Jane Urquhart Read Free Book Online Page B

forward momentum of social history. I wondered howmany sad old musicians had picked out the tune of the last dance, and when and if they knew that they, the dance floor, the scattered dancers, had all become irrelevant.
    As I have become irrelevant.
    Then I walked back to my car, climbed in, and drove east on the King’s Highway Number Two, towards the end of the lake, towards the bridge that would take me back to my own country. My own state.
    It wasn’t long after that I added a canvas to what the critics would later call my
Erasures
series. It was the third painting I had attempted in my new style, the first two being entitled
Concealed Animals
and
The Sawhorse
, respectively. By the time I was finished, there was just the faintest trace of a building in it. A year later, I noticed that the shape of the roof and the dark blue of the lake were coming through the layers of white, but I solved that problem by scraping and repainting. I always wait at least two years before releasing a painting, placing it in the public eye, so that I am able to correct chemical impurities such as the one I’ve just described. It’s rather like waiting for cement to harden, or for a newly constructed house to settle.
    The summer of 1913 in Davenport, Ontario, Canada. The chalky vermilion of the brick walls I passed when I walked, the bubbles in the clean, bright glass of the small-paned windows, and all the gardens but ours weeded, raked, perfect. As I said, I began to explore the town, and I met George Kearns.
    It was a hot afternoon, the park and the beach were full of noisy children, their mothers and aunts; the main street waspractically deserted. I was walking west on King Street, the central thoroughfare of the town, when I saw a young man in a long white apron leaning in the doorway of a shop on the opposite side of the street. I noticed him first because he was about my age and then because of his extraordinary beauty, his blond hair shining like a lamp under the sun, the relaxed curve of his body against the door frame. Then I noticed that he held a sketchbook in one hand and a pencil in the other.
    Even a person totally uninterested in art will approach another who is making a drawing, as if this strange activity of attempting to reproduce the perceived world is one which needs to be supervised, monitored. Or perhaps it is the intensity of the draughtsman’s focus that lures complete strangers to his side; some kind of primitive desire to impede a relationship this intimate between subject and renderer. Having myself been the object of such interference, having felt the drawing dissolve beneath my touch at the approach of an observer, I nevertheless crossed the street and casually broke the young man’s concentration. Smiling, puzzled, he looked up. He never did manage to master the distancing skills I had developed early in life; he never could keep the world at bay. How young and fresh his face was. Perhaps mine was as well.
    He had been drawing Victoria Hall, he told me, because he wanted to paint it on a china vase. Beside him was that window I’ve spoken of, the window of the China Hall. He explained he was wearing an apron because he was sometimes called upon to help out in his father’s neighbouring grocery store, which he could enter by passing through a door in the east wall of his own china shop. I felt that this white apron separated him from meentirely; as indisputably as the fact that he painted on china, a pastime of which I, a serious student of art, disapproved. I leaned on the other side of his door frame and we began to talk. I imagine it was a summer choice between George and his world and the superficial world my father was trying to coax me into that determined our friendship. But that day we spoke only about the heat, about drawing pencils and watercolour paper, about sable and camel-hair brushes. In the course of the following week I stopped at the China Hall to see George whenever I was out