Portraits Unpainted

ONE:

The diagnosis

Dear Renny, I have so little time…

At the age of seventeen I painted a portrait of a man wearing a black fedora, tipped so that it covers his entire brow. The shadow cast by the fedora swathes his features with brush strokes of umber.  A blue checked shirt hangs carelessly open, as if the effort to button it were too great—the shirttails dangle.  He’s come undone, yet the man remains motionless, frozen in time. Melancholia dances in and around on the prevailing currents but never departs. The hush feels as though it could last an eternity. All the while a lifetime unravels as suddenly as a clock spring—he knows it and can do nothing.

Dear Renny, there is so little time…

Think, think—think until your head bursts!But the result is always the same. The day is quiet, serene, and still. Voices (or is it laughter?) are heard somewhere off in the distance. The man is turned away, searching, looking beyond the street—for what I did not know, nor could say.

That was then.

The alcove is dark, despite a noontime sun and cloudless sky. Chiaroscuro, the Italians would shout!Chiaroscuro! Chiaroscuro! But there he remains, standing in the alcove in front of a locked door, beside two windows whose latched wooden shutters have long been neglected. While paint peels, rust is rusting.  The painting originated in the recesses of my heart. It is a masterpiece that has become an allegory.

And he continues to look away, down the street, searching, forever searching. He has been waiting for twenty-two years.

Vernissage?A year after the paint had fully dried. The canvas was varnished with gloss tinted by a hint of ultramarine blue transparent enough to lend a sad hue, a hue that darkened some areas of light. Alas, the glaze condemned the lonely man with the fedora to eternity. He tries to break through to the surface but cannot, and so he drowns. He drowns in sudden surf. He drowns in the riptide that pulls him under a river of seawater. He submerges to a space so narrow that the waning afternoon’s light still filters in. He can taste the sun! It is dear, so dear. It is near, so near.  Nevertheless, life’s atmosphere circulates centimeters away, just beyond his reach.

The portrait is framed. Now it’s defined, contained in a gilded, wooden, horizontal rectangle as if it were a trophy in a glass case, a caged wild bird, or aquarium fish. The frame defines the boundaries my subject will never escape from, can never escape out of. It’s my coffin—or corpse. And there it hangs, gracing the longest wall in my apartment, hung in the precise manner a child might employ while decorating the Christmas tree. It’s an ornament. It’s my crucifix.