Shawna Lemay

Still, Dead, Silent

Our daughter noticed first. The bee that came in a wavering, looping path through the front door and up the stairs, into the stifling room, and then at last, to the lilacs. She had pointed it out to me when it came into the gallery and kept her finger on it until it reached the painting, the lilacs. Then she laughed as the bee bumbled around the deep purple. The fat thing would back up to take another run at the uncooperative flowers, hit the canvas, and bounce back, then hum around again for a bit, before trying a different angle. This went on long enough so that our daughter managed to drag a few adults away to come and see. She dragged them from their wine and conversations, their hands mysteriously flapping and floating, arcing and diving.

When Rob came to see, we both looked at each other and said Zeuxis! as if it were a secret password. Zeuxis, as every student of art history learns, was the revered realist painter of antiquity. Birds flew down to eat the grapes from his painted vine. My heart was caught high and folded up in my throat. The bee must be a good omen of some sort. It was a mysterious moment, touching and silly. Then the winged creature managed to fly straight out the door, leaving us to wonder if it had all been a vision. I wanted to drench the moment in meaning, but then, no, I just let it drop. I too took a perspiring glass of cold wine and sipped, let my hands move toward whatever I was speaking about, joining in creating the invisible knotwork of gestures that afternoon.

It was a lovely day, this day of the bee who fell in love with my husband's lilacs, which is what Chloe said to draw the small crowd toward herlook, the bee is in love with my dad's painting. All but a couple of the paintings had sold. Which, in fact, meant everything. A return to the calm that comes when bills are paid and doubt has been sent its creeping way once again, as it always is, and always needs to be. A return to the table that sits in the middle of our small family and fills with odd objects: bowls of apples and nectarines, jars of lilacs, dahlias, delphinium, whatever is in season. The pleasing muddle of all this, the holy sojourn of light soaking these common things, casting shadows, some stark and deep, others mutilated and wild.

After a show, we all return to the proper rhythm of days, which has somehow left us in the weeks and months before. The paintings are a way of marking time, usually two paintings to a month, or not quite two. And then I fit my poetry into that scrim of time and all is well. At lunch, Rob comes up from his studio in the basement, and we eat bread and cheese and pears cut up and talk about what he's been working on for the past several hours.

He works from photographs taken during elaborate, long, mind-bending sessions. The table he sets up near the window, under skylights, on a sunny day. It's the scene of a great battle, and he is the weak god, the momentary god, presiding over. To set up a vase of flowers, a couple of nectarines, and a bowl of cherries in front of a white drape takes great force and energy. Hundreds of infinitesimal adjustments, the heat of the sun beating down, flower petals dropping. Every leaf must be arranged so the sun strikes it a certain way. A cloud floats in from nowhere. He waits. These sessions are a workout. He moves into and back from the tableau, adjusting and readjusting, holding the camera perfectly still while the clouds scud by. He's breathing hard. Afterwards his muscles are sore, and he drinks glass after glass of water.

I ignore him completely while he takes his photos. I walk by occasionally and set down a book or an object from my study. Chloe and I pick a worm-eaten apple from the tree outside and nonchalantly roll it across the floor toward him. Who knows what the table may accommodate or what astonishing balance may be struck with that one extra object?

Still life has mostly been thought of as a minor genre. Norman Bryson, author of Looking at the Overlooked, has noted that still life is outside of narrative. Still life exists in a reign of silence, and it exists in the shadows of language. The term still life did not come into being until 1650. The French adopted the term nature morte, dead nature, around 1750. The painter de Chirico was said to have preferred the Italian term vita silente, and this is my favourite too. Still, dead, silent, any will do.

Every now and then, Rob is pulled by the themes of vanitas, the transience of time, memento mori. He ordered a replica human skull from a company called Skulls Unlimited, and this has figured prominently in a few paintings. One is on a forty-by-sixty-inch canvas with old books, seashells, and a pewter dish of plums before swaths of black and white drapery. Another is a close-up of the skull sitting on a cloth the colour of fresh blood. Quite a few years ago, he painted an antelope skull and a house cat skull borrowed from a biologist friend. The skulls are part of a baroque composition that also includes strawberries, sunflowers, cut-open pomegranates, a narrow Persian carpet that looks like a dragon's tail, and various pewter vessels. I know these paintings quite well because I also live with them. They are among the (thankfully) few paintings that have not sold, the taste for vanitas paintings not being what it once was.

What makes some objects work together, balance, and some not? I'm yet surprised, after ten years of marriage, more than ten years of living with still life, of what will go, and also how it all connects. That you can take all these elements--the withered orange, the cracked vase, the pollen-dripping lilies--and you can make something of them. The meanings are various, personal, historical, symbolic. But the goal is to create a world, a window, a threshold. The goal is to get at something real, pared down, honest, to make a connection, a place in which souls can meet. To make something honest, I have learned, create an illusion.

When I look at fruit in the grocery store, I'm looking for the imperfect. Imperfections make a thing seem real. It's more interesting to paint an apple that is asymmetrical with an odd stem, a dried-out leaf attached. Sometimes we forget to eat the fruit arranged just so in the white ceramic bowl. This is true particularly with pears. It's a drama to which we're riveted. They slowly turn a soft speckled yellow. And then the exciting part--the sudden unpredictable spots of brown. So ripe, they're easily bruised. Bits of skin inevitably rub off. Juice oozes microscopically from the wounds. By the time we're done looking, the pears are no longer fit to eat.

Cezanne's apples became a motif, and maybe for Rob it will be pears. Too soon to tell, I suppose, what a life's obsessions will be revealed as. Cezanne said, I want to astonish Paris with an apple! We go on being astonished. When I pick through apples at Safeway, I talk to them, say, Astonish me.

I am often astonished at the grocery store, especially in the winter. The rows of quartered watermelons naked without their black seeds, the strange and haunting perfection. Where does it all come from? The fluorescent light shines weakly on the Chilean grapes. The polished star fruit sit gamely in a small perplexed tower. Before Christmas I picked out a few dragon fruit. None of the cashiers could figure out a stock number for them. I had no idea what they were, but I paid five dollars each for them. When I got home, I looked them up on the Internet. We didn't want to cut into the red skin, into the red flower-shape, until we knew what we would find. Inside, the flesh is white and it is flecked with black seeds, something like poppy seed cake. The rows of papayas, I notice on another trip, are sliced in half and wrapped in cellophane so that potential buyers can see the impossibly deep orange flesh, the long pocket of black seeds the size of peppercorns. What colours would you even mix to get that particular orange I ask Rob. Yellow ochre, cadmium yellow deep, burnt umber, titanium white.

When the computer repairman came a few weeks ago, he was astounded that I didn't have a high-speed connection. Nor do we have cable or a satellite dish. Nor do we have a tv that is as large as a painting. We don't have call waiting or Sega Genesis or a food processor. The poor young man's jaw truly dropped. I'd never seen anyones jaw drop so realistically. I left him in my study for terrifying allotments of time. Terrifying because he was charging by the half hour. If I'd had high-speed, it wouldn't have taken so long. Once when I came back to the room, he was raving about the small painting of plums and nectarines that hangs to the right of my desk. The next time, he was entranced by the round oil sketch of a gazing or mirror ball that Rob had done of the living room in the last house we had lived in by Mill Creek. It's disconcerting to me, this painting, because it's mostly the same furniture that we still have but in a house that I've all but forgotten. The walls are in the wrong place, the fireplace is in the wrong room. We no longer have the table that the bowl of pears rests on. And then the whole thing is distorted around the edges. The painting folds in upon itself. It's like there's a whole world in that room, said the computer repairman boy.

While he fixed my computer as quickly as possible with a dialup connection, we talked. I told him about this odd life we live. (He had to ask.) My husband, I said, works in a sixteenth-century medium, oil paint. He doesn't know how to touch type (that was a much later development), let alone retrieve lost or fix corrupted files. Nor do I for that matter. I write poetry, I told him, always with pen and paper first. The repairman said he'd read Shakespeare's sonnets in high school, and he knew some pretty awesome limericks. He helped me recover an essay that I was writing for a poetry class. The file was called "How to Disappear-Poetic Ecstasy and the Work of Poetry." I should be more careful about how I name my files in the future, said the boy. I became quite fond of him by the end of two and a half hours' labour.

We contrive to make our days as silent and still as possible. Rob sits in front of his canvas for about eight hours a day. He works on a grid system, which means that he first marks off his photo at intervals using fine thread, then applies the same grid on a larger scale to the canvas. He spends up to two days drawing before he makes the first mark with oil paint. His painting is careful, meticulous. He might paint an area four or five inches square in a day, depending on what he's depicting. An apple might take half a day, a few plums another half a day. The drapery might be quicker or slower depending on the intricacy of the wrinkles and folds and the way the light strikes it. He's meticulous, but paint inevitably gets on some part of his hand or clothing, which then migrates to another part of the house. James Elkins, in his brilliant and off-kilter book on the alchemy of painting, titled What Painting Is, says that "the last object to be stained is often the living room couch, the one place where it is possible to relax in comfort and forget the studio. When the couch is stained, the painter has become a different creature from ordinary people, and there is no turning back." Indeed, there is no turning back. Unlike the bee who fell in love with the painting of lilacs and then gave it up, we are committed to the firm illusion of the canvas window and to the stringent scent of paint.

There's no turning back. Vermeer, in debt to the baker for three years' worth of bread, painting sales diminished, gave up the ghost. In a beautiful poem called "Daily Bread," John Reibetanz notes how Vermeer's widow said that Vermeer fell into a frenzy and went in "a day or a day and a half . . . to being dead." But the paintings go on to feed "a hunger no daily bread can fill: for light." For us, the frenzy occurs after the American Express bill comes, at which time this poem comes in very handy--to remind of other hungers.

We live at the end of a cul-de-sac in the suburbs. The families on either side of us are in love with Rob's paintings and come by to admire them when he takes them outside to photograph for his records. All summer long we receive small gifts from our neighbours. They have greenhouses that produce large cadmium red tomatoes. We receive bulbs, bouquets of cut flowers, handfuls of seeds. Half of the perennials in my garden came from one neighbour or another. At Easter last year, our Greek neighbour, an accountant, who lives diagonal to us, called first me and then Rob to look at the flayed lamb he had hanging in his garage. He was preparing it for the spit in his backyard. He knows quite a bit about still life and has seen the pictures of game that were popular in the seventeenth century. He saves flower seeds for me and tells me the Greek names. Every time he sees us, he gives us something. Tells us to come into his yard and pick whatever flowers Rob would like for his still life, anytime. He grows heliotrope and campion and various flowers that remind him of Greece. He also grows a long row of gladiola immediately beside his house. When we do go and pick flowers, he tries to press more on us. If we took every single one, I get the feeling he would be thrilled. When the other neighbours, on our west side, are on holidays, he picks us flowers, zucchini, raspberries, and big green peppers from their yard too. He strolls over, shirt off, whisky on his breath, and swears at them in the way that you swear at people you dine with regularly--and hands off all the produce to me over the fence. He knows what would look good in a painting, and he looks for the flowers with interestingly twisted stems. He feeds us, and he feeds the paintings.

The summer after we first moved here, our Greek neighbour was the first neighbour we met. He gave us a basil plant that day. We introduced our daughter, Chloe, to him. He was overjoyed, since Chloe is a Greek name. Whenever he sees her in the front yard, and I think he'll be doing this until she's sixteen, he yells out from deep inside his garage, or wherever he is weeding near the house, "Chloe, I love you, Chloe!" This always makes me feel proud and serene, and oddly giddy, none of which makes particular sense, and this maybe is what makes me always laugh out loud when I hear him, so that his loud bellowing is followed by my giddy laughter every time. He tells Chloe that she is Greek, and I think she believes him. I once heard her tell a friend that she is part Greek, and I never bothered to correct her.

Whenever I hear our neighbour yell, "Chloe, I love you, Chloe!" I am also reminded of our honeymoon in Italy. Rob and I were late for our train in Florence that was to take us to Venice. We had run down the busy street that early morning, still crisp and cool, with our baggage bumping wildly behind us. We'd purchased our tickets the night before, so when we got to the station, we just frantically hopped on what we thought was our train. We'd breathed half a sigh of relief, when we realized we needed to be across the tracks on a different train, which had just begun making slight departure-type motions. We grabbed our bags once again and threw them on the new train, which started to move alarmingly quickly, then jumped on after them. Flushed with all the excitement and minor drama, I stood at the back of the car while Rob was just inside. I was still partially outside, helping to stuff our bags inside, when I looked up to see a man jogging beside the train and singing in English, "I want to marry you . . ." He followed along with one hand on his chest, the other raised the way an opera singer raises his hand for the long notes, for longer than I could hear him sing. We sat down at last, both of us grinning, and took big yellow apples from our bags and ate them in huge bites for our breakfast and looked out the windows at all the places going by, blissed out, saying next time, and really believing we'd be back.

Walking to our hotel in Venice, we stopped and bought more apples. We set them on the windowsill in the common room, three of them, spaced evenly, and took their picture. I remember taking the picture, though I can't find the photograph. It was a picture of how we hoped things would turn out for us, so I won't describe it too well, which might spoil it, our work in progress.

One sentence, uttered in a certain way, starts a cascade of memory, a flooding of associations through time and space. I'm astonished at how many worlds there are within the world, at how the past lives in the present and how it sings, silent, still, in a loaf of bread, in an apple on the sill, in a handful of tomatoes passed over the fence. I'm amazed by the daubs of orange that appear on the skirt of the couch and by all the other couches through history that have had similar daubs, and I'm amazed by the knotwork of gestures that hang in the air, visible and invisible, magically retrievable. It's stupefying really, how many connections can be made from looking at the objects residing on one table, in the middle of one small house. And it's true that there's no turning back.

That is how it was when, a few years ago, Rob was commissioned to paint a work for the doors of a large tv cabinet. Not for my husband the ceilings of churches or fancy altarpieces. The client wanted a picture of a vase of flowers, made to measure. The painting, once executed, would need to be cut in two and then mounted on the doors of the cabinet. The client and Rob's art dealer, Doug Udell, were both sensitive that Rob might be offended by such a prospect. But he wasn't, as it seemed to remind him of something that could have taken place in the sixteenth century, if they had had televisions. He painted peonies, their big drunken heads, besotted clouds. There was something Jovian about them. He painted red-black cherries at the base of the vase, an offering for the flower gods. The gallery took care of the surgery and the mounting of the painting. The framer who did the cutting said it was a terrible moment when he'd reached the middle point and realized there would be no going back.

I like to think of it, though, this painting that was made in my basement, its colours mixed and applied in thousands of tiny strokes over a couple of weeks. I like to imagine its double life. In one it is silent and whole. It conceals, mystifies. It is the scene of nothing happening. Unless you count the stems drinking to save their lost lives, the fragrant petals slowly collapsing each onto each, the mad leaves pretending to talk to the roots, the cherries staring loud and black and deadened. In its other life, cleaved, open, winged like some strange Nike. Abiding, split, just on the other side of narrative.