Plein air sans brush

All I could hear was the crunch of my boots on the parched cracked dust, crystallized into place by a pattering of rain earlier that month. There was what passed for a river up ahead eking a trickle out of the sand, snaking past an outcrop of rocks. I could make out the barest sliver of shade clinging to the edge of the red rocks, hiding a cool blue spot that would be perfect for painting.

My spot looked like a set dressing of a 1950’s western; the type of place an old and wizened cowboy with steel blue eyes and skin as rough as rocks might take his young son to survey the roaming cattle. The smell of snakes and burning sage wafted up at my painting kit; balancing tenuously on the three points of the weather worn granite.

It was my clumsy knee that knocked my paint brush out from its wallowing hole in the pea green brush pot. It tumbled down between the boulders. I could just make it out at the bottom, almost lost. The same thing happened to me once in Africa but it was a baboon that stole the brush when I wasn’t looking and he ate it so I never got it back. I had to use a tooth brush for the rest of the time I was there.

I was dammed if I was going to lose my favorite brush, I removed my now burned and numb butt from the hot rock that I had been sitting on for an hour and climbed down. But as I stretched my hand down toward my plump maroon paintbrush, with its bristles caked in beads of sand and a blanket of fine dust, it was just out of reach. From above it had looked like a relatively easy valley that it had dropped into. But now, as I tenuously extended my hand down into the crevice, hoping that I wasn’t about to be perforated by a grumpy rattlesnake rudely awoken from its afternoon nap, I realized how close to lost the brush was. I couldn’t reach it.

I convinced myself that it was too hot for the snakes. To make sure that they weren’t tempted by my juicy fat hand descending past their resting place, I jumped up and down on the rocks and made loud clapping sounds to scare them away. Then I dove head first into the crevice.

I was now upside-down, my belly resting on the downward slope of a very uncomfortable rock, my arms outstretched into the crevasse. I was armed with two other paintbrushes, positioned like chopsticks, grabbing at my big fat brush. It was an ungainly sight.

After much grunting, moaning and a cramp in my right hand, I was triumphant and got the brush back.

White Horses

Ears flat, the pink of the inside of his exploding nostrils spluttering like a seashell, he was drowning.

What would we do? Wait for the body to wash ashore or would it just sink, and how would I explain a missing horse? Mouse was floundering in the surf, as waves churned foam in his eyes.

Then he started to swim. Pounding the water, gripping with teach and muscle and fear to life. I would feel the push and surge of the dark water pass me as we both started to cut through the sea.

We were headed out, away from land.

‘Help me’ as I held on to a frantic Mouse.

I had to turn him into shore. I pulled on the rein; the pressure turned the pounding barrel of the swimming horse. But as a wave swung over us slowly, like a sailboat at summer camp, Mouse began to capsize.

He started to slip to the right. With no yaw in his leg movements, and his rotund body, Mouse was tipping over like timber.

Terror in his eyes and another wave coming, my cold skin prickled with fear, I had to do something. Why shouldn’t a horse work like a small sailboat? So I slipped of the left hand side of him, holding onto his straggled mane and using my weight, I pulled him straight as he completed the turn.

Now, faced directly to shore, he focused. He pounded for his life out of this water. I held onto him like he was an orca whale, slipping through the surf.

surfing opossum

So in my studio, after a few days of painting, the smell of turpentine, bees wax, linseed oil and Dammar varnish permeates the whole house. I had these paintings laying flat on the floor to dry, shut the door, turned on the fan, and left a slight crack in the window to drain out the fumes.

The next day I checked on the drying and the paint swirls. There were little flecks of paint in the lip of a curling, braking wave.

Did I do that?

I didn’t remember making those marks and on closer inspection, they were not the shape of any brushes that I had used. And they were in the middle of a flowing brush mark that I did not want to cover.

As I was removing the marks, just like a CSI agent, I stopped. I realized that they were little foot prints. One going one way and a second set going the other.

Strippers

It was one of those recent rainy nights. It had been raining all day, and not the normal English rain that halfheartedly spits at you but that great big spring rain. With thick pregnant raindrops and a warm haze in the air that seems to have bounced up from each shattered drop. I was soaking, almost to the skin; I could feel the trickles running down the warm clammy bit of my back as I parked my bike in the hallway of the strip club.

Ed was on the door, “is he here today?” I asked.

“Ask the girl behind the bar,” he said.

I had a big smile on. I love cycling in the rain. I was coming from my life class up in deepest darkest hackney. I have been in this club a number of times, courting permission; each time asking and each time being told to come back and ask a different person.

I stick out like a sore thumb. With my tousled wet hair pinned up haphazardly and my spring coat that I got from Reiss, two toned form the storm.

“Is Tom here?” I asked the girl.

“The one in the suit” she pointed to the end of the bar.

There weren’t many people in the strip club on a Wednesday night. I walked up to the bar between two guys in suits; one guy had a girl in green draped around his neck like an overgrown medallion. She was taller than me. I could see the downy blond hairs in the small of her back.

The friend was unsure what to do with himself, looking as if at a game of tennis between three players, between the girl in green, the now completely nude dancer on the pole; all slithery and creamy white; and me. He was smiling.

The first time I had been here was in the bright sun of the afternoon, it had seemed then both safer and seedier. I asked an older lady with a great broad east-end accent. She had told me to come back in the evening. It gets busier in the evenings, but it is still not too full.

The first time I ever went into a strip club was for my 23^rd birthday party. I had it at Cheaters on Hollywood Boulevard. All you could see of the club on the outside was the blue lights flooding out onto the dusty pavement. It was a great party. And my boss at the time, a very well behaved graphic designer from the firm I was working at bought me a lap dance. She was a pretty brunette with big hard boobs and she smelt like very sweet soap. It was all a bit wired for me but my male friends still say it was the best party.

Tom the elusive owner looked like a very nice guy, smart in a well fitting suit. He had two guys flanking him. They were cute, the kind who used to skate in the concrete parks in the south bank a few years ago before getting a job in a design firm. They smiled too.

“Can I draw in here?”

he looked perplexed, not sure if he had heard me,

“I have a studio round the corner and I really want to do a set of drawings in here” I smiled, he smiled “of the girls”.

“Is that the place with the big black doors?” he paused, “It’s got graffiti on it. What dose that say?”

“Showreal?” I asked, “Yea, that’s it”

“I never knew what that was” he mused, but it was more to the design skaters than to me, or maybe to himself. “it’s an artists studio is it?” this idea of a building full of artists confounded him in the same way this converted pub full of beautiful girls enticed me. He was well spoken, and considered me for a moment. I could feel him looking at my wet clothes and my shiny face, “When?”

“In the daytime if I could, I find it a bit daunting in here for me at night” I do. The men stand differently and the women are intimidating in the way that the big girls were at primary school. They are all taller than me in their massive see-through plastic stilettos.

“Sure thing.”

And that was how I made these