Wednesday, December 17, 2008

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.

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