The Grass Painter – by KA Rees
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When you look at me, you wonder what it is like. To be an artist. I think what you are really asking is what it is like to be a failed artist. Let’s face it, where are the successful ones? Does anyone know? You may know of them, from catalogues sitting unread in your magazine rack, from guest spots on Arts on Sunday, but you do not know them. You do, however, know artists like me who serve you. Who work as your baristas, your cleaners, your children’s entertainers. Who arrive at the door with glitter and metallic paint and large brushes that scream of ruined furniture.
I am the outsourced fun.
That’s what comes up in chit-chat when you look at the tricolour paint under my nails, and that odd whiff about my skin, the smell of turpentine. You look at the effect of the chemicals on my hands; how my skin is cracked and flaking. I used to worry about that smell, when I was younger – not any more. Those worries – they are the concerns of a hopeful artist.
“I have other smells to think about. Poverty, for one.”
I have other smells to think about. Poverty, for one. That is a smell that concerns me, how my breath always reeks of tuna – I hate the stuff, but tuna and potatoes are Affordable Items on my shopping list. I stick to home brands from the majors or I shop at Aldi. Sometimes I add Other Items when I have a little left over. Mushrooms and butter. Last time I was in Coles, I took a fistful of thin green chives, I dropped them in my shopping bag and brought them home. I found a small glass jar that once housed anchovies and I added a little water. In went the chives. I spent the afternoon smelling them, that whiff of faint onions, with the even fainter one of salted fish. That dark forest green. The colour of mountains. Pine forests. The tang of snow in the air. Cold cheeks, gloved fingers entwined.
Not now.
Thank a fat god for the self-checkouts. Where, if you’re quick about it, you can get those waxy Kipfler potatoes and put them through as run-of-the-mill Nadine. Where you can swipe grapes and secrete them in with a couple of kiwifruit in high season. That last lot were hardly worth the effort. Already oversweet, in that heady territory of sugar on the verge of ferment. A whiff of ammonia. The downhill run.
Like me. Half a century (plus sundries) coming up, but I’m hardly waving my bat about in the air.
I haven’t had an exhibition since Grasses. It was, as the name suggests, paintings entirely of grass. The walls of the bone-white gallery turned every shade of green. The local newspaper critic called it spectacular. But no one bought any of my grasses, even though a room full of green is a marvellous thing, just like touching lichen with the heel of your palm. I had a silver-haired swallow sniffing with her bulldog husband; she umm-ed and ahh-ed (and polished off quite a few cocktails) before leaving Grass Melody on the floor once my back had turned to neck one of the discarded mint juleps. God awful. Whoever thought of putting mint in a drink should be shot out of a cannon. I was rooting around behind the trestle table looking for the bottle of bourbon the gallery owner had hidden, when I heard grass growing and knew my only hope for income had walked out the door.
One cannot live on grasses alone.
I’ve cut down the café shifts again. I’ve saved a little for more paints and canvasses. It’s never enough, but there’s that, and there’s Douglass in ArteScape, old goat. He gives me paints with a short shelf-life that he hasn’t managed to flog to the schoolkids and their mums who have always wanted to try their hand at painting. As if you paint with a distended hand, waving it around like a glove at the races. What they don’t realise is that it can’t just be your hand. It has to be your whole body, most of your head and all of your soul.
And it might up and leave in the middle of the night and you will walk around forevermore patting yourself down like you’ve misplaced something terribly important.
It might also get you chucked from your apartment. Found that out the hard way. Too much of the Stanley cask wine with aforementioned Douglass from ArteScape. No studio for me, just the kitchen floor with that god-awful lino. Looked like ’70s chuck-up. Much better with paint splattered over it, concealing its banality, such dreariness. At least when I’d finished with it, it looked like a Pollock. All of that splattering. Spectacular. If only I could get a tenth of the money his work commands. We were covered in short shelf-life paint, me and the old goat. Then it got into the nylon carpet. That shade of bruised blue and purple never lets go. Bit like the grasp of an old goat, his half-moons digging into my thigh like there was still meat to get at. He would have been disappointed. And I am too disappointed to care. Although, it is nice to bitch about the mothers with their thin wrists and fleshy gold bands glinting from fingers swollen with rings.
One of those beauties would pay my rent for months.
Not for me, that dance. I would rather be alone. No wedding band on these scrubbed fingers. Not having someone else’s disappointment swallowing me, and it wouldn’t be Douglass – he is well on the way to drinking himself to cancer. I get the feeling that he will enjoy it when the time comes. Nurses to look after him, to fuss over his crotchetiness. Oxycodone for the pain. To crack witticisms with his fellow patients and be considered a stoic. He could just be stoic now, but no.
I paint Douglass’s sad arse in the middle of my canvas and surround it with grass growing right out the crack.
“I paint Douglass’s sad arse in the middle of my canvas and surround it with grass growing right out the crack.”
I wait till five; commence drinking what’s left of the Stanley cask and settle down to paint. There is pleasure in drinking and working till the small hours. I always make sure I’m in bed before the temperature plummets. It starts around three, but worsens by four. It is a morbid time. A time for ghosts and recriminations, a time for shadows and things that move out of the corner of your eye.
The Stanley is almost gone; my eyes are red and heavy. I hear sounds and go to switch the TV off, but it’s off already. I notice a huge web hanging behind the telly, but don’t remember seeing its owner making it. I use the torch on my phone and hold it up over my head, watch the cobweb sway from the draft winding its way down the corridor. The cobweb reminds me of snowdrift. I watch it, like I watched the drift from the window of a log cabin long ago.
I wash the brushes and scrub my skin and crawl into bed with only my nose poking out from under the covers.
I wait for sleep, dreams of an alpine forest.
I go to the café and work the afternoon shift. They are all smiles and efficiency. They want me out of there by evening. My face doesn’t attract their target demographic. Too mortal. Middle-aged flesh, greying hair (although, hello! it’s dyed!), my brashness not enough to cover up charade. I’m waiting for my shift to end, then I will need to find something else that barely covers the bills. I dread it more than sitting at a blank canvas with only memories and finding you have nothing left to paint. ▼
Image: t h e_h i d d e n
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