Conscious Choice: Whispers of the Canvas

May 1999

Whispers of the Canvas

by Ana Arias Terry

The young peasant woman stands enraptured at the sound. Is it the lark’s song she hears or is it the longing for freedom carried in its notes that renders her incapable of moving? With her eyes fixed in the distance and her mouth gaped in awe, Camille has temporarily left her body. For a few seconds of complete immersion in the bewitching sound, she’s oblivious. Heedless to the patches of dirt on her face, the handkerchief wrapped around her head, the button-down, white cotton top, the overused, shin-length skirt, and the farm tool apron that wraps around her belly.

Camille stands with bare feet amidst a field of wheat, still gripping a scythe with her right hand while her left hand dangles against her body. Nothing else matters in that moment of rhapsody. Not even the silky, luring rays of the sun rising in the background can distract her from the moment.

The gentle slopes that compose her facial features — forehead, eyes, eyebrows, nose, cheeks, lips, and chin — focus their very being on the bird’s song. Her neck stretches out to attention like a heron carefully assessing the approach of an intruder.

The singing bird stops, and Camille smiles. She closes her eyes, tilts her head back in the cool morning wind, and thanks the bird with all her might for this gift of illusion. For the bittersweet comfort of its throaty talent. "Today," she thinks to herself in secretive delight, "I will breathe the spirit of this lark, and I will exchange my thirst for a dance in this field."

Such is the story whispered by the canvas and its brushstrokes to this writer when she looks at the mastery of paint created in oil by artist Jules Breton in 1884.

Paintings are not simply two-dimensional renditions of a gifted woman, man, or child. If we pay attention, we can taste and touch the lives of the scenes before us. The characters and objects displayed have stories to tell. And the exquisite essence in this gift of discovery lies in its inherent ability to change the story time and time again even though we’re looking at the same painting. And sometimes that chameleon essence changes to one where it insists on continuing the same story where it left off.

I remember the day a painting first spoke to me. No, it yelled at me. But it was a beautiful scream. I was visiting dear friends in Oregon, who took me by a friend’s art gallery. The friend was on the phone when we approached his store, but he kindly looked up, smiled, nodded, and waved us in with his free hand. Hungry to observe the splotches of color hanging on the walls, I began my own tour. The owner’s phone conversation wafted and settled in the background, and the click, clock of our shoes on the wooden floors picked its own rhythm.

Out of nowhere I heard a hissing, deafening, "Psssssssst." I looked around the gallery, but no one else seemed to notice. Right about that time, I spotted it. And immediately I knew where the supernatural call had originated. It was the Latin Indian woman in the canvas standing at the corner of a rural, cobble street. Her large body was wrapped in a red and orange skirt, a tiny swatch of white cloth was the only part of her blouse revealed by the heavy llama poncho that covered her. She leaned up against a row of adobe houses with rust "teja" roofs. Her black, long hair swung freely about her as the beads of perspiration surfacing from her part cast a slight reflection from the full moon over the mountains.

Her black eyes stared into mine with the focused precision of a hawk after its prey. And like the rabbit that instinctually senses its eminent fate when the hawk’s claws first brush its fur, I was hooked. Slowly Rosita reeled me in and began to tell me her story. A story about when she first met — and spoke to — her shadow.

Since then, the stories just won’t stop. They leap out of paintings in all sorts of flavors: somber and melancholy, philosophical and thoughtful, unbelievably goofy and silly, and sometimes plain bizarre. Not all paintings tell me their stories. Some paintings don’t call out to me, and I accept that gracefully because I believe they’re meant for others. I can still be mesmerized by the artist’s talent, even if her canvas and lines prefer a different interpreter.

Of all themes in art, I’m drawn intensely by ones with agricultural and rural themes. The connection I feel brims with a fervor that must fill a deeply primordial gap that will not be covered or denied.

Take for instance Jean-Francois Millet’s "The Sower." To me it’s a tale of melancholy and birth. The sower I see and hear is a strong man whose muscular shape has been carved out of years of working the land. In the background the shape of a man near a haystack bathes in light. In the foreground, where the sower embarks on his speedy but expert farmer’s gait, it’s dark and shadowy.

Over his left shoulder and around his waist is a makeshift holster with a basket that he holds with his hand, while the other hand slightly behind him sprinkles the seeds that will bear him — and those for whom he toils — nourishment. His rounded hat and long-sleeve shirt protect him only slightly from the elements. His pants are but tights and his boots look hardy. But they’re not. They simply add a layer to feet that have grown accustomed to being as hard as the earth.

His face is only partially visible from hat and shadows. His broad nose, thick lips, and rock chin are ones of a man who has the confidence to accept the life to which he surrendered. Antoine sows the field with an air of fought resignation, but resignation nonetheless. After 14 hours of sowing, tilling, and weeding, he walks back to his cabin for the night. There, in the quiet and unseen recesses of his only private time, regret floods his shack. The aches he endures are not of his taxed muscles. It’s for the life he wishes he had chosen — a ballerina’s.

In Rosa Bonheur’s 1849 "Plowing in the Nivernais: The Dressing of the Vines," a dozen oxen plow the field while four men either steer the plow or guide the bulls with their sticks. But what draws my attention is not the background of green, open space and bushy trees, nor the thick, dark clumps of soil in the foreground. It’s the bull second from the front of the double row.

While fluid trickles out of his nostril, his right eye stares at me. No point in ignoring it. It’s there to stay until you pay attention. "Yeoh, buddy," it says. "Come‘ere. As you can tell I’m having a ball here, but, uh, what do you say you and me trade places for a while? Give me a pass so I can go chase some bodacious mooing babes and maybe scratch some skin. My hynie has been itching somethin’ fierce, and I see a mother of a limb over there that would make any ungulate smile for hours. Have a heart buddy, whatda say?"

No doubt some of these artists, if not all, would cringe upon hearing of the stories their paintings insist on telling me. Rightly so? Perhaps. But what better way to savor the genius of their brushstrokes if not by the imaginative tales they ignite within each one of us?

The contrasts between reality and fantasy invoked by such works of art are, pardon the pun, fertile ground for an extraordinary hobby. Take, for instance, the stark differences between Vincent van Gogh’s "Harvest at la Crau" (and its less than precise translation as "The Blue Cart") and Samuel Palmer’s "The Harvest Moon." While the former generates an aura of bright plausibility in its essence, the latter flirts in sheer magic.

In Van Gogh’s world, the scene is that of a — you’ll never guess — blue cart sitting roughly in the middle of a vast field of agricultural representation. Yellow and brown grasses sprinkled with red flowers invite us into the painting. Deeper into the canvas, we see a low fence made of old gray, brown, and reddish wood. On the other side are deep dwarfed green trees and bushes being tended by a figure with a hat. To the right is another set of crops lighter in its hue of green. Across from these lies a vast open field with hay stacked on the left and ladders leaning against it, the blue cart in the middle, and more open fields with other figures tending to their soil on foot and by horse-drawn carriages. A few farmhouses and structures decorate the landscape with their red tin roofs and whitish sidings. Deep into the painting lie blue mountains to the right and the beginning of town buildings to the left. The sky floats with certainty wrapped in a blue-green-gray hue.

Palmer’s "Harvest Moon" lights the wheat croppers and their head bandanas in a yellow brightness that bubbles with the supernatural. It’s as if the luminescent stars and moon had a hidden purpose for this field of wheat in the middle of a green and brown forest. After the faces hidden by the head wraps finish their arduous task, the field perspires openly now that it’s on its own. But not for long. Soon, out of the blades of wheat, miniature witches dressed in transparent wings of beige thread stretch and yawn their way onto the field. Their sole purpose is to play and converse amongst each other while dancing to the haunting resonance of the obliging moon.

If I ever have the opportunity to see a child’s painting that depicts her family’s potted crops, I’ll bend down and smell it. I might just taste the carrots. Or if she shares her painting of the row of sunflowers that she planted in the backyard, I’ll tell her the story I see and hear. And the next time I’m in a museum and a stranger finds me smiling at a painting on the wall, I’ll invite him in to my story. Maybe it will help him find his.

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