A sunset night on fire, the notes of a ballad. Already a memory before they happen. Instant isn’t fast enough, nor staying enough. Chiseled marble has the weight but lacks speed. What between those extremes could suit?
Oral storytelling might work, but it’s unmarketable. No good for a gallery showing, and I feared doing it again would provoke the critics: pretentious. Desperate.
My aim is fixed on a target too far off. A still image is a fat, slow bullet that drops from the barrel to bed itself in the dirt. I want confusion and intrigue. Tuesday, the blond woman on a bicycle that I glimpsed from the train. She captured all my attention in one burning instant and drew all my sight in around her. Then the flat gray bulk of a bicycle shop and a white van traveling exactly slow enough to hide her, and she was gone. She is overexposed in my memory from recalling her so often. A halo surrounds her now and the colors of her eyes and nose have alloyed, a dozen negatives overlapped.
My next endeavor: an image that flicks on and off and changes each time, a thousand different possibilities inside each flash. But no, because change would then become a constant: the observer can say, “this is an image that changes.”
I need a static image that changes in the mind. The parts congeal and stretch to match a pattern half-memorized. Embryonic detail evolves and never settles. The observer cannot be sure what to say of the image, only that it has four quadrants, or it is mostly green, or it reminds one of one’s youth in a curious way.
But it cannot be indecipherable. The human eye recognizes the whole world in an instant. I nab a sketchbook and woo inspiration. People in windows. Waves behind boats. I wander to the racetrack in search of motion. Anything that glints and catches the eye. All of it is too recognizable. It has to be strange enough to stand out: a pattern on a moth wing, a limpet on a rowboat. I have to forgo the sketch book, or at least the sketching. I cut a square from one page and watch my wanderings through it.
Tuesday, the woman on a bicycle. Blond with cream pink blouse, teal bicycle, lofty sun and filigree shadows. Seared in my mind for a month and I have layered trial after trial upon canvas with this palette, her palette. As one canvas dries, I spin my chair to the next and paint over the old. My sketches grow coherent and I tinker instead with my method of rapid exposure. I make up a large box with wooden guillotine blades that open with a lever. Elastic bands snap it shut hardly a second after. I paint the box white so it will not distract, or the motion of the blades might become part of the bright image itself.
For a week I leave the painting inside the box and think only of other things. I paint over the sketches with dark colors and avoid the train and its phantom muses.
When the week elapses, I agonize over this moment. I put it off another day, and finally I am trapped in the studio with it and two glasses of brandy. I must stand beside this box to operate the lever, and so spend an hour positioning a mirror I can use to see directly inside. And when the lever flicks and the guillotine blades move, I see merely a glimpse. The snapping wooden blades startle me, but I am overcome with the desire to see it again. It will be the same for my audience.
Though I made the painting myself, it was different from my memory. Reborn behind the guillotine box. The lever becomes irresistible: the artist has been taken in by his own trick. Or else the painting has undergone a true metamorphosis inside the box. My fingers that had pulled the lever tingle and I back away from the box where it sits on an easel by the mirror. With this final wave of relief, there is also a burgeoning dread.
I cannot reveal it to anyone.
