As a
photographer sometimes unconsciously senses the need to freeze a moment in
time, Daniel felt the compelling urge to fix the moment of soul-penetrating
beauty he had witnessed through the medium most accessible at the time. Barely
conscious of the world outside, the drive home across the Cambridgeshire Fens
to Peterborough registered merely as an irritating blur; a smear on the window
into a more meaningful world.
Concerned
parents’ voices sounded afar off as though heard remotely in an empty building
as he mounted the stairs to his room.
“Time for the meeting!” filtered through. There was no time
for the obligatory nightly church meeting. Now was a time to capture this
snapshot of his soul, which nothing and nobody had the right to despoil. He
closed the bedroom door, and breathed in the temporary sanctuary. As the
fighter sees the red mist, the racing driver sees only the finish-line, the
surgeon follows ahead of the scalpel, so Daniel saw only his easel.
Fortuitously, paint was already on the palette; oranges, umber, blues, white, a
shocking dab of scarlet, still glistening. A primed canvas sat on the easel,
relic of painter’s block more than a
fortnight old. Anxious knocking on the bedroom door.
“You go to the meeting. I need to be alone!” was the only
response.
The energy was now furious, emotional and nervous; like anger, tempered by long
habituation into channelling itself into colour and form. Unable to choose a brush, Daniel lifted a deep
blue hue on the end of a palette knife. He was not conscious of the choice. The
drawing appeared to flow from under the blade as he moved in swift, brisk
strokes across the scratchy surface. A flat, featureless landscape in the lower
8th of the picture, the horizon broken by a rude church steeple and
the roof of a combine harvester. Above, the true inspiration took shape; a
roiling, boiling mass of cloud; searing white on top, boiling, heavy blue
underneath.
The palette
knife was discarded, and he dipped his fingers in the paint. Every touch on the
rough surface of the canvas seemed to flow from his visual memory, and his
fingers moved over the entire fabric, much as a harpist’s hands move across the
strings. He was lost in the scene, feeling the huge updraught that twisted the
cloud into a spiralling wisp, feeling the scorching sun as he added the obscene
whiteness on the cloud top. The shimmering orange-to-grey heat haze sung off
his fingertips, and vibrated across the foreground. The clouds took shape and
boiled off the canvas, menacing the viewer, while the landscape protested and flickered
below.
He
realised that he had not paused to draw breath. Standing back from the canvas,
Daniel felt the cold perspiration begin to chill on his face and back. He
stared at the canvas, which was a boiling mass of threat, anger, and chaos.
Dipping his smallest brush into a pale creamy yellow, he added one tiny note to
the church. A symbol of hope, protest, an emergency beacon flashing beneath the
huge menacing bulk of the cloud. The sharp point of the steeple was compelling,
rather like menacing an elephant with a knitting needle. The canvas was
complete. Exhausted and creatively spent, Daniel kicked off his shoes, lay back
on his bed and mused on the painting which he had created almost entirely
without preconception. Perhaps it was a metaphor for his life? Menaced by a
huge, depressing, overwhelming bulk above, with the tiny, insignificant but
pointed sword of intellect and creativity below, scared but willing to fight.
This landscape
painting did not survive a house move, one of the greatest regrets of my
creative history. Many times, when pondering tables of pharmacological values
and developmental milestones, I long for the return of this creative lucidity.
For the moment, it expresses itself in writing; these fingers, long attuned to
changing bandages and tending to the sick, still itch to tap into my soul, my
vision, my experience. Nursing is my vocation, but art is my inner dream.
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