A Portrait Of The Soul

My art comes at a high price. 

A price higher than most can imagine, and for reasons few could comprehend. Kings and commoners alike had fallen to their knees before me, begging and bartering with all they had, just for a chance to be immortalised in one of my many portraits. 

I indulged a few, when offers were made simply to lavish to refuse, and I would always wonder if they could see the quiet dissatisfaction concealed behind my smile. As novel as it was to paint royalty, no matter how rich they made me, nor how brilliant the portraits were, it did little to change one simple truth; I could never capture their souls.

How my paintings came to be so fiercely desired? Well, like most tales worth telling, it all began with rather humble beginnings, and unbeknownst to me at the time, ended rather bloodily.

I spent my youth amongst the vales and folds of the countryside, flanked on all sides by nothing more than sheep and fields and a future as a farmhand. At that point in my life, the brush and canvas were all but foreign to me, my hands far more suited to the intricacies of the plough and pitchfork, rather than the delicacies of the brush. The lack of utensils, however, did little so subdue the curiosities of my mind. Much less the hunger of my eyes. 

Whilst the beauty of the countryside was enough inspiration for some, with its rolling hills and patchwork fields; bubbling brooks and fern clad forests, my gaze longed for something else. Something far more personal. 

The faces of others. Endlessly intricate and never repeating, beautiful and ugly, entire lifetimes mapped upon the skin. Creases on foreheads and lines around the eyes, the folds of chins and cheeks, the curve of the lips. Colours, textures, condition – every scar and blemish and pockmark – and most importantly, the eyes. I felt as if I could understand a person so entirely by looking into their eyes. The contrasting values, both full of life and exhausted beyond relief. Dark and light, young and old, alive and dead. A persons very soul staring back at me through their own little windows into the world.

I was obsessed. 

Most of all with one subject in particular. A girl. The loveliest daughter of an otherwise inconsequential village, whose visage struck me as that of an angel. A peculiar beauty made even more fierce amidst the background of pig shit and plagues; she stoked a fire within me until the flames roared. 

Her face was full and round, smooth skinned, awash with gentle shades of pinks and reds which blushed on the apple of her cheek. Her lips were plump and curved deeply into her cupids bow, like a pouting cherub. Her nose, aquiline in shape, betrayed her stock; she was a true English rose.

Then, there were her eyes… wide and round, green, full of life as swathes of moss that carpet forest floors. There was innocence behind them, a longing for all that was good and kind in the world. In her eyes I saw hope and from that moment on I was utterly beholden to her, I understood that to be the purpose of my life, to express the way she saw the world; I knew I had to paint her. 

I came to know her as Charlotte, and she sat for me on many occasions during those early days. I fashioned brushes from horsehair, I trifled endlessly over the pestle and mortar, mixing pigments and used just about anything I could as a canvas. She never tired, nor complained, no matter how long she sat for me. Time and again I would try, with all I had, to capture what I saw behind her eyes, but something was always missing. The element which made her everything that she was to me, like chasing your own shadow, just always just out of reach. 

We grew up together like that, I would paint until my hands couldn’t bare it, and she would sit with the patience of a saint; with that same look in her eyes which I could never capture. 

It went on like that until the sickness came, like great blackened clouds filled with thunder, it swept the land. The infection was slow and terrible, a haggard cough which would draw the air from the lungs and life from the body. It sunk it's teeth into Charlotte and tore the light from her eyes, and with it, the light in my life.

As she lay there dying in that little village, through laboured breaths, she asked me to paint her one final time. 

In all my years since I don’t believe I have ever painted with such furious desperation as I did that day. Every brush stroke, clumsily laid, as I raced against the inevitable. My fingertips stained with pigment, shakily reaching out toward the canvas, as if in pursuit of the thing was just beyond reach; her soul, escaping, expelled from her with her final breaths. 

I stayed with her for days after. Toiling with the painting. Her eyes were still open, I couldn’t bring myself to close them. They were empty, vacuous and pitted, devoid of everything that made Charlotte who she was. Where hope once resided, taken over by nothing but fear, disease and death. I had failed. I couldn’t capture her soul, her beautiful eyes remained unpainted, resigned to fade from memory, no matter how hard I tried to resurrect them on the canvas.

~

Time marched on, and so with it, life. I would eventually leave the countryside behind, it’d become haunted by the shame of my failure, moreover, without Charlotte it could no longer satiate my hunger for inspiration. The familiar faces had grown dull, their eyes had nothing left to tell me, I craved more. 

So, I travelled far and wide. Cities falling before me, endless and expansive, a cacophony of fresh faces to feed my hungry mind. London, Paris, Rome, Moscow. I Painted my way across the map and back again. 

As I went my talents flourished, my portraits became more refined, skilful depictions of the many faces I encountered. My mind broadened and soaked in culture, my circle grew, with each evening spent amongst the opium haze of smoky cafes; in the company of poets and playwrights, courtesans and cobblers alike. A thousand walks of life, a unique visage matched to each, with eyes full of stories that I never learnt how to tell.

My portraits were brilliant, my clientele grew exclusive, I amassed more fortunes than I knew what to do with. I established my own studio, a nest amongst the rooftops of Paris, I indulged in the finest of pigments and the most lavish brushes money could buy. Where once I painted paupers and prostitutes, fascinated by their weather worn skin and demeanours rough as the cobbles; now sat a procession of Lords and Ladies, Clergymen and Politicians, all very prim and proper – manicured within an inch of their lives – straight backs and hands gathered neatly upon their laps. 

Whilst I admit, The former were far more pleasurable to paint, the latter far more profitable; none of it really mattered to me, I could’ve painted the entire population and it wouldn’t have changed a thing. It couldn’t stop Charlottes eyes from following me everywhere I went, taunting me, I still couldn’t capture their souls.  

It went on like that for years and my obsession with their eyes grew closer to madness. I spent my free time delving into various museums and galleries, scouring the vast array of works for the impression I wished I could replicate. I think as humans we are deeply lonely creatures; we search for companionship in almost anything and rejoice in finding common grounds on which to bond. I believe that is what fuelled me, I desired to find someone, another artist, alive or dead, who saw what I saw behind the eyes of others. I lusted over that fantasy, the climactic moment when I would find someone who understands my frustration. Maybe even someone who had figured it out, who had the answers, the technique I was missing, someone who could catch the ephemeral, like lightening in a bottle, someone who could render a soul with paint.

My search was fruitless, for years I went on painting and searching. Praised and commended for my work, led like a donkey around the insipid circles of the elite to be shown off like some prized possession. They’d never have known it, never could see it, could never see what I saw. I was painting corpses. Empty vessels adorned in finery. The shining medals on the generals breast doing little to draw attention away from the dead eyes. The bridal dress, stark white, looked more like a burial shroud to me.

It wasn’t until I had become an old man, with a storied face of my own, marked with wrinkles and the fatigue of time, that I came to realise my error. 

The night was dark, the sky filled shrouded with heavy black clouds, pregnant with rain and filled with thunder, which blotted out the starlight. Alone, I sat in my studio, a lifetime of aches and pains jabbing at my weary body. The room was as busy as my mind, a maelstrom of portraits, hanging from the walls and leaning against every wall; all amassing dust. 

I couldn’t bear to look at them. The fruits of my ambition, the results of a dream never accomplished. My life’s work. A myriad of faces, mocking me with their phlegmatic eyes, devoid of life. The same look I saw in Charlottes dying gaze, the look which haunted me in my nightmares. There it was, again and again, my many failures, staring back at me on every side. Boasting with the absence of all I ever wanted to capture. 

I believe that is what possessed me to do what I did that night. My obsession, my lust, to capture that formless thing that swirled behind a person’s eyes. Every one of their hopes and dreams, what they love and hate, their fears and regrets and everything else that made them them. I was going to paint the soul.

There was only one person left to paint, staring back at me from the mirror. The tired face of an old man. Mouth pinched in concentration and brows furrowed, fat cheeks and rolling chins; testament to a life filled with gluttonous wealth and desperate loneliness. Every wrinkle on my skin, some recollection from my long and prosperous life, not worth remembering in such detail as I painted them. Then there were my eyes…

How to paint my own eyes? My own soul?

All I saw looking back at me, my eyes, bloodshot and welled with tears. A lifetime of frustration broiling behind them, rage burning hotter than the fires of hell, and desperation; deeper and darker than the pits of the sea. 

There were eyes all around me. Judging. Watching. Poised to gloat in yet another failure with their emptiness. Charlottes eyes, drilling into me from somewhere distant, the faces on the walls. My own eyes staring back at me. 

I couldn’t take it anymore. I reached for the pallet knife.

It’s difficult to recount the following hours with any accuracy. There was pain at first, and blood, hot and thick. I remember hearing whaling howls, feeling the tearing inside my throat, the weight of the brush and knife in my hands; so very alike. It all seemed very distant from me, like I was merely a bystander to my own body, echoes of sensation reverberating around a vast and empty chamber, like ripples on the surface of my skin.

It went on like that for hours, until I felt the warmth of the morning sun, cresting the streets of Paris, filling the studio with a golden wash of light. 

That was the first thing I remember seeing. When I awoke from that sleepless dream. It felt like breaching the surface of the water at the moment of drowning, gulping in the clarity of consciousness after being barrelled by the swell beneath the waves. 

However, something was different. There was a different man standing before me. Young and strong, as if carved from marble – like that from antiquity – full of virility and boldness. What was once my shirt hung around his form, tattered like ribbons, stained red. Chest heaving with heavy breathes, sweat beading on his skin. The figure looked primal, as if borne from some ancient ritual, a promethean; as I regarded him, I felt as if I was gazing upon something forbidden.

He too seemed to be aware of me, scrutinizing me through the bloodied pits in his face where my eyes once were. Intangible and ephemeral as I had become, given form only by the brush strokes on the canvas, he regarded me with the satisfaction I wished to feel when I looked at my thousands of other paintings. 

That was when I realised, after all those many long years of failure, that I had finally succeeded. When I carved my eyes from my skull, my soul came flowing forth from within; I had split myself in two, my body cleansed, and my soul trapped within my portrait. The epitome of my life’s work, a reborn vessel striped of it humanity and a living picture; trapped for all eternity.

My art comes at a high price, the cost is sacrifice.