XIII

elf-portraits are difficult. You confront the conflict between truth and beauty with every brushstroke. The same can be said of this tale. Your narrator will come across as someone at once both arrogant and self-loathing. He could hardly be a sympathetic character. Have faith that there is a truth here though and in that truth, if not beauty, there may be some symmetries or tones that suggest a route toward beauty.

It is my belief that artists are generally painting variations on self-portraits in every face. You only have to look at the characteristic Pontormo oval eyes and long fingers to be certain that the man had heavy eyelids. We see Leonardo again and again in his works. You'd not ever have to see a portrait of Reubens to know that he had excess flesh upon his cheeks perhaps amounting to jowls. It is the same in literature where every character is a variation on the author but that argument much more palatable. The author only sees the world through a single perspective. Only their thoughts and sights are first hand information. Everything else is a secondary source that must be filtered through their personal experiences. Their characters, no matter how they may choose to disguise it or surmise otherwise, can only imagine what the author can imagine.

We unconsciously reflect ourselves in the work through both our aesthetic and our design choices. If a painter were endowed with an irregularly large forehead, there would be decisions about pates on every figure drawn. Most of the decisions would be made unconsciously or at least deeply repressed but self-consciousness (and self-awareness) would influence the work. The artist may have no more awareness of this infection of the self into the figure than an author might.

One could argue that faces are not subjective, that we all see things exactly as they are, that it is a physical object that is copied by the craftsman. It is a reconstruction of the real. I challenge though that in fact we do not see as clearly and objectively as one imagines. We project our own visage onto every face we see. That fellow with the remarkably large forehead sees foreheads first and foremost and, as such, they dominate the facescape.

Perhaps another way to regard this issue is that we see the world generally as either 'like me' or 'not like me' and it is as we learn our art (and so our art of observation) we simply achieve smaller and smaller categories for definitions. Initially, as a child, three eyes would be 'not like me' but I have since become much more refined, I trust.

I had, as I have said, employed my Beatrice's image into many works since first becoming aware of her. She had been portrayed but not portraited. The distinction being that in a portrait, I must strive for likeness, but when I am using her as a model for a figure it is important that I invoke the sensibilities that I am seeking. The effect that I am trying to manifest is unrelated to her physical characteristics. Nobody else looking at Beatrice will see what I see in her and I as try to portray that mystical aura, the closer I get to realism, the further I get from truth. Really, the painting had little to do with the truth about Beatrice. This was a painting that told about me, through the choices that I was making in the creation of it.

I could not tell what it told. My brush could carve out a bold line of red and while it pressed the oil across the canvas, I could hope that the viewer would think the painter brilliant and brave for such a mark. That mark, placed alongside all the other painterly smears, must speak for the painter. This Beatrice portrait stood perched upon my easel, silent to me, and cried aloud for any prying eyes to assess its author. No spectator would walk away from it believing that they had learned anything about the subject. This umber-orange rectangle was not a portrait. At the time, that concept would have eluded me.

Youth strides boldly, hand-in-hand, with Ignorance. We know that She is just a foolish girl from next door but we will never admit such to ourselves. We are in love but more, we wish to be in love and to love something that is not great humbles us. When we are young, we do know that we are not wise. We know that there is so much more to learn yet let none call us on it. We will fight to defend the merits of our beloved Ignorance.

In my near-to-childish foolishness I lied to myself about both the quality and integrity of the painting. The painter pretended that since he had finished it, it was good. To imagine that something has merit simply because it is as good as one could produce at the time, without exerting more effort and attention, is Hubris. Had I, those years ago, even considered the work from that vantage, I could have argued, with some great sense of having common sense on my side, that the Gods were, in this sophisticated modern epoch, much less prone to strike down mortals for such impudence. We are under no obligations of piety and we are free, perhaps encouraged, to exult in Hubris. Even the Fates have hung up their knitting (no doubt feeling that their work was 'good enough'). What happened next required that I be struck down.

It is night when bad ideas most often strike but worse, that is when they twist under the skin and become difficult and painful to extricate. My feet hit the cold tiled floor of the basement suite. The full lights had to be shown upon the work. Yes, there in that split second of revelation, before the mind has time to become accustomed, there is an instant of clear judgement when the viewer must decide in a literal flash if it is as good as they remember. It passed the test. It shouldn't have, but it did. It was good enough and so I knew what had to be done.

I could not keep the painting. I had kept other images of her but this one was too personal. This one plainly told of my intensity for her. Keeping it was impossible. Already, only two days after determining that it was complete, it had begun to weigh upon me. Each moment that it shared a space with me, I was confronted by my ongoing obsession for the cellist. I had to be rid of it. For the sake of my sanity, it had to be flung far from view. Madness though had hurled me from my lumpy bed and it continued to propel my actions.

It was the touch of a disdainful God, punishing me for my pride that had me plucking up the still fresh oil painting and stumbling toward my car in the dead of night. There was only one possible home for the painting. It had to be delivered, at that instant, without any hesitation, into the hands of Beatrice.

XIV