inspiration |ˌinspəˈrā sh ən|
noun
c.1300, “immediate influence of God or a god,” especially that under which the holy books were written, from Old French inspiration, from Latin inspiratus: “inspire, inflame, blow into,” from in-“in” + spirare “to breathe.”
“in you everything sank!” ~ Pablo Neruda
More dangerous than an affair is the idea of one. Affairs end; ideas live on once delivered to the imagination, Sogah.
I wake up in the middle of the night, Sogah—where is the middle when you never fall asleep? I dig through the wind’s skin and scratch scratch scratch at nothing. I look for Vega, Lyra, Altair and million, million, stars, Sogah, to give me something, anything to ignite what was once there.
She wasn’t like the others. She didn’t have a provocative beautiful face—it was just a face. But her legs—like silverfish—offensively demanding of attention—had me. They were spindly and yet muscular. If observed with detachment they could have belonged to a young prepubescent boy fond of running around.
To understand desire—desire that rises like a torpedo within the pit of the groin, that vortex which can’t be poked with fingertips—became an obsession. If it was merely lust it would be satisfied with the object of desire, it was not lust to satisfy a physical urge. It was not to fulfill a void in my personal life. How many artists you know who are still married to the same person who bore them two beautiful, intelligent teenage daughters? It was neither a yearning for a spiritual union, Sogah. So, help me understand, Sogah, what was it? Before her legs I hadn’t picked up a paintbrush or pen or pencil like that to draw in how many years? Ten? Twelve? Her legs breathed life back to the artist that I once was. But she wasn’t a muse, Sogah. I had continued to draw all these years without any recognition, awards, and gallery exhibits not worthy of mentioning. You can’t say I hadn’t been inspired to create, Sogah.
The first pencil drawing I did of her—legs in a light twist dangling underneath a table, the evening sun highlighting the lines—was the first time I met her. It was a quick sketch, really, at Le Vignette coffee shop where I stop by on some Friday evenings. She was sitting there, stoic and steady, sipping her dark coffee, holding a blissful daze off into space. I realized I too wanted a glance into whatever space she was looking.
I showed her the sketch. She wasn’t flattered like most women I had drawn previously. She said, “If I didn’t know any better, I would say you were in love.” I can’t explain anything other than that, from thereon, I wanted to be with her—to create around her, with her, of her. That night I went home and prepared to expand the sketch of her legs, the coffee table, her legs, and love of a fleeting moment into a 50 by 40 canvas.
I met her at Le Vignette again. And again. I made love to her in my dreams. I made love to her when I fixed breakfast for my wife and the two girls. I never made love to her like I wanted to.
One evening, the evening I most wanted to trace my fingers alongside her legs, but instead stared at her expressionless face, I told her something I had never even told any of my art coaches. The ones who had tried their best to offer me positive platitudes, techniques, and support to somehow thrust, nudge, coax me out of my creative slump.
I told her about Elizabeth Peyton.
She is an American painter who rose to popularity in the mid-1990s, a contemporary artist best known for stylized and idealized portraits. Her career launched unexpectedly, a fact later endorsed by the art market where the price of her works has steadily increased. An oil on canvas representing John Lennon was sold for a record $800,000 in 2006, Sogah! Works by Elizabeth Peyton are now in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris including other galleries.
Elizabeth Peyton’s work is characterized by elongated, slender figures with androgynous features. Her work at times resembles fashion illustration. She has indeed acknowledged the importance of photography as an inspiration source for her art. Her work is most often executed in oil paint, applied with washy glazes that are sometimes allowed or encouraged to drip. Several other works in colored pencil have also found notoriety, and recent work has included etchings.
I told her I wanted my art to be like Elizabeth Peyton: dripping everywhere.
She listened to me and then abruptly got up. She told me she didn’t want to see me again. I panicked. I don’t think a man can feel that sort of frieight unless he loves, Sogah. So I touched her arm gently—for the first time—and told her, “I love you. You can’t leave me.”
“You don’t love me. You are looking for God in your art. I am not art. I am not a messenger.”
I told her she didn’t understand love nor art.
She got up and left. I watched her light, long legs carry her out the small door of Le Vignette.
I didn’t sleep that night. I had dreams she would meet me again. She had to. She had been the answer all along. My wife didn’t understand but there wasn’t anything to hide. My wife and I had long negotiated what we were incapable of understanding about one another.
I went to Le Vignette next week but she wasn’t there. She wasn’t there the next week. The third week I decided to stop by every day just in case she was now having coffee on a different evening than Fridays. I didn’t see her any other day either.
I went back to my art coach. Now the coaching wasn’t even about my art but about her, the missing link.
I decided I was going to finish the 50 by 40 painting, now titled, “The Weight Bearing Structure.” I cried some nights when I would take a break. I laughed at my genius other nights. One random Friday, when the painting was nearly finished, my daughter popped in the studio and told me the painting “was not sexy like legs are sexy” and that’s why she liked it. I gave my daughter a big kiss on the forehead that very moment which caught us both by surprise and took the weekend off from painting and dreaming.
The Weight Bearing Structure.
I stopped going to Le Vignette for months. But Sogah…some afternoons have a way of carrying you back. I stopped by one such afternoon. She wasn’t there. The barista asked me, “Are you the painter of ‘Weight Bearing Structure’?” I told her I was.
She handed me a note. “This is from a woman. She said to give it to an artist named Julian. I saw your photo in the paper.”
I knew who it was from. “When did she give this to you?”
“Two weeks ago.”
When the painting was put in the exhibition.
The note read:
Julian
Mika Toimi Waltari was a Finnish writer, best known for his best-selling novel The Egyptian.
I share a quote from it:
“I, Sinuhe, the son of Senmut and of his wife Kipa, write this. I do not write it to the glory of the gods in the land of Kem, for I am weary of gods, nor the glory of the Pharaohs, for I am weary of their deeds. I write neither from fear nor from any hope of the future but for myself alone. During my life I have seen, known, and lost too much to be the prey of vain dread; and as for the hope of immortality, I am as weary of that as I am of gods and kings. For my own sake only I write this; and herein I differ from all other writers, past and to come.”
Most have never heard of him. He changed my life.
That is art. It transforms us the moment we read it, see it, or hear it. That is love, too.
-Rainy
Sogah, I love her.
There is no rehabilitation from an addiction to that kind of love that bursts open a light inside.
An affair with the imagination is a never-ending story and I just want another fix.
Help me, Sogah.
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great story…very thought provoking sentences about love ,affair and art.