Finding Jim (33 page)

This mountain where Jim died, how can it be harmonious? How can I weave together muted greys to join heaven and earth? How can I express peace and calm when what I feel is anger and discord? How can I give colour and life to this mountain when I see it as death?

I push aside the oil colours and place my sketchbook on my lap. Today, I will give my anger permission to surface. Without looking at Cézanne's work, I pick up my brush and slash watercolour paint on a clean page of my sketchbook. I gaze around to see if anyone notices the tears welling in my eyes. No. Keep going.

“Oh, what do we have here?” my art instructor whispers over my shoulder.

I shift so that I can see him and laugh nervously. “I couldn't paint the mountain that way. I have to do it this way first.” I feel like a kid who has done something wrong, who has failed.

“That's great. You do what you need to do.” He looks at me with a slight query but no judgment. On my paper, blood-red colour flows down the mountain like lava, outlined in black anger. I have painted the words “discord, death, red, fall, broken heart, pain” in the stormy blue sky. One more time, I think to myself. This time in black. In a few minutes, my second watercolour is complete. Black with words scattered about: anger, why, empty, hopeless, fear, alone, sadness, tears. I flip back and forth from one painting to the other and smile. I did it.

After we have all struggled to put paint on paper, the art instructor leads a seminar on colour.

“What colour is this leaf?” He sits before us holding a simple, oblong green leaf against his white palette. Silence, as it seems like a trick question.

“Green, right? It's green,” he answers himself and squeezes some green oil paint onto the palette. Holding the leaf beside the colour, he asks, “So, is it green?” The leaf looks nothing like the colour.

“Okay, so it's not green. What is it? It's grey. That's right. The world is made up of shades of grey. And how do we get the grey of this leaf? We add its complement.” He leans over his palette, carefully mixes red in with the green until he has matched the colour of the leaf. Several ah-hahs sound from the audience.

We paint all afternoon, but my unfinished painting of Mont Sainte-Victoire is so imperfect, I purse my lips at it. On the way home I try to be patient and look at my surroundings with a keener eye, to see the truth. But my thoughts return to the chocolate éclair and the ice-cream bar waiting at the corner store. I am scared of discovering all of the colours in nature because I am scared of discovering all of the pain in my heart.

Painting is going to open something for me, I'm sure of it. Keep going. Be patient and gentle with my brave heart. When confronted with uncertainty, do not get afraid; learn. You have to let go. You must commit to painting the truth.

How do baby birds know when to learn to fly? They wait in the nest until it is time and they take off. Why don't I know when to fly? Maybe I do and I'm just not listening for the cues.

The next day is “fieldtrip Friday” and my skirt sticks to the back of my thighs as we bus to the hilltop medieval village of Gordes, popular with famous people and the world of Peter Mayle, who wrote
A Year in Provence
. Narrow streets spiral past white and grey stone houses to the top of the heap where a 12th-century fortified castle encloses the city hall. We prattle on about the view of the Luberon Hills, compare purchases from the village market and sample the local jams, cheeses and olive oil. I buy a wide-brimmed straw sunhat and some olive-oil soap. Some of our sweat dries in the air-conditioned bus from Gordes to a Cistercian monastery, l'Abbaye de Sénanque.

Our chatter dies down as we wander between rows and rows of blooming lavender to the massive limestone archways of the monastery. We stop to suck in the sweet smell. Inside, I pull my shawl over my shoulders and tilt my head back to follow the square rooms up to arches and finally into round domes. Monks dressed in earth-brown robes glide by. It's quieter and slower than a library.

En route back to Aix, most people sit in silence, gazing out the windows at the golden hayfields, limestone houses under burnt-red clay roofs, lavender fields and dark-green cypress trees illuminated by the sun. No wonder so many people come to Provence to paint.

Back at the art studio we pack up our rickety, foldable easels and clamber into a van to drive along the same route Cézanne clipped along in his carriage one hundred years ago. It is a 10-minute drive to our destination, the town of Le Tholonet, where we unload beside a small creek surrounded by giant plantain trees. Across the road, hayfields run into crags of rock in the foothills of Mont Sainte-Victoire. This is painting
en plein air
.

My eye catches a footbridge leading over the creek into the forest. Flannery O'Connor writes in her essay “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” that painters should see the subjects in their paintings as characters in a story. As I tighten the screws on my easel, my eyes dart around, seeking the essential in the scene. Do I leave the ferns in? How do I know what to leave out? I pinch my eyebrows together to observe honestly with all six senses, to find the movement in the scene. Water moves, that seems a given. In my journal I list the possible characters and their personalities:

Bridge: stately, solid, protective, scarred, bossy, anal

Creek: energetic, happy, young, athletic, noisy

Ferns: wild, wanting, talkative, thin, tough

Plantains: tired, motherly, achy

Ivy: needy, unsatisfied

Sky: calm, peaceful

Sitting on the grass, I muse over the storyline. What happens between these characters to create heat and movement? The bridge momentarily bars the water on one side, causing an eddy, but the water escapes with a raucous laugh. The plantains scold the bridge while the ferns race the story from one to another. Where is the water going and why does the bridge want to stop it?

Great, so I've got my characters and a scintillating storyline. Now for the master creation. Every few seconds, I check to see that my painting looks like the real thing so that people can tell me what a good bridge I've done. After one hour of careful, deliberate, faint paint strokes on the canvas, I am pleased with my well-behaved, content characters. It looks like a bridge over water. But I don't sense movement, or heat, or a mysterious sixth sense, or much personality. There is nothing confrontational or committing about my painting. I am absent. Frustrated, I assault a clean canvas with paint, raking my arm back and forth as if to heavy-metal music. Sometimes it's easier to find the essential, the hotspot, the personality, if you paint quickly, because the ego does not have time to override creativity. My second painting is an unrecognizable mess of colour. Good grief.

My story percolates in my brain while I prepare my paints and root to my spot.

When the instructor gives the cleanup warning, I cannot believe three hours have gone by. I was in the zone. Rock climbers describe “the zone” as intense concentration on a task that cleans the mental slate of extraneous thought and demands pure reason. Somehow I forget myself when I paint, and there is a certain beauty and timelessness in forgetting yourself. Flannery O'Connor writes that the only way one can discover the spirit, the essence, of something is to “intrude upon the timeless, and that is only done by the violence of a single-minded respect for the truth.” I hold my painting at arm's length to see if it is truthful. I can't tell, but something feels different.

Seeing the truth takes reason, courage, time, practice and an open heart. Maybe being open to seeing the truth is just as important as actually seeing it. Someday I want to experience the reality of the world with all six of my senses and paint it in a way that is true to my heart and soul. Dante describes life as the relationship between “substance” and the “accidental.” Perhaps if I study nature enough to see its grace, I will see how life, death, love and compassion join everything in the universe, and I will be aware of the essential in life – the substance – and what is not essential – the accidental – and present their relationship truthfully.

Seeing the real world through spirit and mystery requires a deeper vision and understanding. There are feelings I cannot face right now.

My time in the zone organizes my thoughts, settles my ego and gives me perspective. I don't want a part-time relationship. I don't want to drive back and forth from Vancouver and Whistler. I want one home in Vancouver with an art studio. There are three weeks left for me in France.

For hours every day I paint in order to complete the required 30 canvases. In 40°C heat I walk for one hour to the exact lookout where Cézanne painted to capture Mont Sainte-Victoire. At the end of the course, we host an exhibition of all of our work. Two of my rock-climbing buddies come, and I lead them through the studio and point out my paintings, saying they aren't very good. They linger on one of my paintings but not as long as on others'. I want mine to be the best, to get accolades, to be the most popular, but I feel a certain pride that they are mine. I have still not quite grasped the lesson that it is not all about me.

Two days before my flight leaves for home, I meet with the instructor for a one-on-one evaluation. As I wait outside the studio for my turn, I overhear the instructor complimenting one of the other students. “Just keep doing what you're doing. You're on the right track.” I rock back and forth and consider making a run for it. I ache to hear that I am on the right track.

“Hi,” I smile and sit down next to him. He looks up briefly and returns to his Rodin thinking posture in front of my paintings all lined up in a row.

“Hey, Sue. How's it going?”

“Good,” I lie and match his pose.

“So, there they are.” He waves his hand at six weeks of my work.

“Yup.” I raise my eyebrows and nod my head. I sneak a peek at some of the more vibrant works belonging to other students around the room. My paintings look pale, one-dimensional and ghostlike, and I look down and clear my throat. If I reached out to grab the substance of my art, my hand would pass right through like mist.

“You know the way you paint, such small detailed brush strokes, reminds me of Renoir.” He mimics painting holding his hand up very close to his face. “Renoir was arthritic, you know. Near the end of his career, he painted from a wheelchair.”

Sweat builds behind my knees. “Oh, right, well, I am very detailed,” I confess. “I look at Elly's painting and she seems to say so much with so little, like Cézanne. I wish I could paint like her.” I press my lips together in hopelessness.

“But that is Elly. You have to paint like Sue.”

“I don't know how to do that,” I mumble.

“That's why you must keep painting. It will come.” He smiles and begins a technical discussion about one of my portraits. I nod and agree every now and then, but my mind skips to images of my next painting. When my report comes, I receive an A+. I know I'm not the best painter in the course, not even close, but I made progress and tried hard.

After the flight home, I arrive at my parents' doorstep. Dad offers to drive me the 30 minutes out to my aunt's acreage to pick up Habby. When my aunt opens the door, I crouch in ready position for the usual greeting. Habby races at me, licks my entire face with the vigour of a carwash, hopping up to get just that millimetre closer, interspersing licks with gentle nibbles of my nose. I laugh and try to keep my mouth closed against his gigantic tongue. Soon we roll on the floor.

It's almost dinnertime by the time we get back to my parents' house, and I've got two more hours of driving to get home to Whistler.

“You look tired. Why don't you stay here overnight?” Dad looks worried. Why do I rush home to Whistler? Because I want to be there if Jim comes home. Well, there's no rush.

“Okay, yeah, that's a good idea.” I unpack just enough for the night. Dad looks relieved. I sleep solidly for nine hours with Habby curled up on the bed against my legs. It's comforting to have a warm body in bed with me.

In the morning, Dad puts his arm around me and asks, “So, are you moving back to Vancouver?”

“I'm not sure how I would do that. I'm not ready to sell the house.”

“You could rent out the house in Whistler so that you could rent or buy something in town.” My throat tightens at the thought of a stranger living in my home. That would really be giving up on Jim. But part of me gets excited about a space of my own in Vancouver. I envision a spacious, bright place, close to the beach, where I can paint, write, meditate and do yoga. I say nothing.

“I think it's time to take a break from your house, just to see how it feels. I think it's an important step.” Dad looks at me earnestly. The lump in my throat aches. I nod. Scary. I could use logistics to dampen the idea, such as the money and time it would take to move. But I know moving is my next big challenge because the idea keeps surging up from a deep place within me, my sacred root, my inner Jim. Tears fill my eyes, and Dad squeezes my shoulder. I drive home to Whistler.

At five o'clock the next morning a sliver of a moon hangs in the blue sky over Whistler Mountain. I've lain awake in bed for hours with jet lag and the anxiety of being home. The walls, furniture and linen reverberate with memories of Jim. I fear my heart might stop beating from the intense pain.

Without my daily painting and cooking regimes, I search for purposeful activity. When faced with adversity, the heroines in
Little Women
fell upon their mantra “hope, and keep busy.” I get my hope from Habby and from my inner voice, my inner Jim. In my journal, I list things I enjoy doing with the goal of reaching 20 items. My pen keeps going to 29: playing guitar, walking with Habby, reading, writing, drawing and painting, yoga, cooking, laughing, dancing, biking, rollerblading, visiting friends, exploring the wilderness, hugging Habby, loving, listening to music, sitting in the sun, learning, climbing, ski touring, making love, being out of breath in a beautiful place, eating chocolate, drinking red wine, travelling, watching a video. These activities make up my safety map.