Black Lines

I was angry.  I was sad.  I was in despair.  I was all of those things wrapped up into one.  One ball of mixed emotions, like a ball of yarn that has been unraveled and then wound back up imperfectly.  You know how when you put a ball of yarn back together, it always has knots.  I was that tangled ball of yarn.  Angry.  Sad.  Despairing.  I sat down to paint.  I couldn’t sit.  I went to the easel.  Stood, picked up the brush, and began.

The woman considered the painting in front of her.  It was captivating, uncomfortable.  She wanted to look away, but she couldn’t.  Darkness.  That was the only thing she felt when she looked at it.  It sent her into the dark.

Lines.  My paintbrush moved in lines.  Black lines.  Every line connected to every other line.  My anger found itself winding over the page.  Twisting.  Turning in on itself.  Evolving.  Anger matured into sadness.  The lines seemed to become more soft.  Perhaps it was the tears that began to drop onto the page. When I ran out of paint and had to lift the paintbrush from the page to return to the small jar of ink, I felt disconnected from my emotions, from myself.  That was the hardest part.  Not feeling them, but disconnecting from them.  I moved from anger to that soft, sad despair slowly.  I couldn’t even tell you the minute it changed, but it did, at some point.  I couldn’t be in denial when I held that paintbrush.  It felt like a tool of expression, kept me from denying those senses.  Another tear fell, blotting the curved line.  I let it.  Let the sadness have a voice, a place in the painting, let it ruin the perfect curvature of the line.

But it wasn’t a scary darkness that she felt.  It was a trust your instincts, you can’t see with your eyes kind of darkness.  It was a removal of the sense of sight so that she could feel kind of darkness.  She wasn’t scared.  No.  She allowed herself to feel so many things, as she gazed at the painting.  Those lines, some perfect, others curved and twisted, drew emotions out of her, things she hadn’t allowed herself to feel in years.  She felt her capacity to feel expand.  Why had the artist painted this, she wondered? Why the lack of color?  Why were there some places where it looked as if water had been involved?

It was after the tears fell that I was able to feel regret.  This one was hard, and stopped the brush a couple of times.  Pauses.  Moments to look back and see what I could have done differently.  After all, we are products of the people around us, those closest to us, and the decisions that they make, but we are responsible for our own reactions.  One of our greatest freedoms is how we respond.  And I haven’t always responded well.  I’ve responded in anger, in outbursts of rage, but mostly in silence.  Suffering inside through my own emotions.  Had I let them out sooner, things would have been different.  But I didn’t know how to express myself in words, only through painting.  I looked up for a moment around my room.  Full of paintings.  Those paintings were my autobiography.   I knew how I felt, what was happening around me, what each one represented.  My favorite one was the house.  A cottage in the woods, as different as could be from the crowded apartment in the city that I actually grew up in.  I longed for a home.  Not a physical home.  I had one.  It was a home for my soul that I longed for, a place where I could belong.  Painting that house didn’t settle my soul, but helped me understand my restlessness.  That’s what painting was.  The key to understanding what was happening on the inside.

All colors blended together make black.  That was one of the first lessons I learned as an artist, but I had learned it as a child, mixing paints.  My dad used to leave his paints out and I would sneak into his studio, dipping my right finger into each one, swirling them together into my left palm, until they blended into black.  It was magic, all of those colors could transforming into black.  I felt that now…all of my emotions emulsifying into one bleak blackness.

She wanted to know the artist.  To know why he had painted this way.  She looked at his other works, saw the color in them, the true, rational lines, the concrete objects he had painted.  A house, a tree, a skyscraper, even a bird.  She wondered what had happened to make him suddenly paint abstractly, without color.  Something had changed.  It was what made this painting the center of the exhibit.  It’s utter uniqueness and need to be interpreted, understood.  But wasn’t that what made it famous?  It couldn’t be understood rationally.

At some point along the paintbrush’s journey, the anger that had turned to sadness, that had made its way through regret, turned into a sort of still acceptance.  I set the paintbrush down and reached for a thinner one.  This muffled and discreet acceptance couldn’t be expressed with the same thick bristles.  It was asking for calm and quiet.  Resigned.  There was more detail to it, more nuance.  Anything requiring detail would need a smaller brush.

She closed her eyes.  Embraced the dark.  Pictured where she would have to be to create something so dark and puzzling.  She searched her memory for a time when she felt angry enough to let it all come out as black curving lines on a page.  Maybe when her sister died suddenly on her way home from school that autumn day.  She had stayed home sick while her sister went to school healthy, never knowing that the sickness would preserve her life, protect her from also getting hit by the bus that had taken her sister’s life.  How the anger had turned to sadness over the years, especially at pivotal moments, like her graduation, or her wedding.  She could easily connect with the feeling of despair, and regret that she hadn’t been by her sister’s side to protect her, perceive the trap of “if only” that she had spent so much of her life stuck in.  She let the emotions coil and twist inside of her, the way the lines on the page did.  Some, able to follow, some so tangled up in one another that it was impossible to feel where sadness ended and something like despair began.

I closed my eyes, letting my fingers adjust to the thinner paintbrush.  It felt different, would cause me to use slightly different movements.  Just as acceptance felt different.  Different from all of the other emotions.  It was the untangled part of the yarn, the calm that I had fought for.  It wasn’t saying anything was ok, but that I could accept what had happened as part of my story, part of this painting.  I tried on the paintbrush, the same way I tried on acceptance, what it felt like.  What would it feel like to be at peace?  What would my paintbrush do?  I let it touch the page.

She opened her eyes and studied the thin line that was almost connected to the thick, winding, black line.  For some reason, the artist had left a miniscule gap between the two, the size of a period on the end of a sentence.  It was the only gap, the only place where continuity broke.  The thin line weaved throughout the painting, sometimes crossing over the broad strokes that the artist had painted, sometimes winding next to it, the thin line mirroring the thick one.  This thin line that could almost be called dainty was unlike the wide line because it could be followed the whole way through.  She followed it as it wound through the entire painting, a continuous piece of thread in the middle of a scrawled storm, followed it all the way back to the bottom right corner, where it ended, strangely close to where it had started.  The budding flower at the very end of it was so delicate, and appeared as yet another knot, unless it was looked at with intention, studied for a moment.  It could have been mistaken for a scribble, the quick movement of a pen that hasn’t been used in a while, reviving the ink.  It was a very delicate, budding flower, perhaps a lysianthus, but hard to tell exactly, because it was just beginning to bloom.

He breathed deeply as he drew the tiny flower, the hope in the darkness, thinking of how every flower ultimately comes from a seed buried in darkness.  It was only about the size of a thimble, tiny in comparison to the scope of the painting.  He scrawled his initials at the bottom.

The Flower.  She wondered at the title.  The flower wasn’t what the painting was about, or was it?  Unless you were up close to it, paying detailed attention, you’d never see a flower.  You’d see angry lines, sad splotches, tangibly feel the rage and despair the artist must have felt to paint something so dark and pulsing with emotion.  She hadn’t known you could actually feel what a painter felt until she’d felt this painting.

He hadn’t planned the flower, hadn’t planned the painting at all.  It just flowed out of him, his thoughts and emotions blending together until they became black paint, until the paintbrush journeyed so many times over the canvas, ending with something hopeful, something so abstract in darkness.  A flower.