The Paintings

I am a painter. As far as I can remember, I always painted or drew or sketched something, usually always the same thing over and over again. I was especially prolific during my years in high school and college and then I stopped completely. It is only when I started working with John that the desire to paint, rather the obsession to paint, resurfaced. It was an important part of me that I had suppressed, but I assumed that everything came to pass and I never questioned the reason why I had stopped. I kept all my brushes and paint; somehow I couldn’t part with them. I love the smell of bristles many time used and cleaned.

I would draw eyes, eyes and nothing else. With dark pencils or black ink, I would draw hard, empty, frowning, sad, scared, cold, haunted eyes. They came alive on paper. It became my trademark. In high school, my work was well known for its gloom and was much appreciated by my teenage counterparts. At that time, my work was regularly exhibited at school and won several merits. One of them I remember particularly well. It was a very large painting made entirely of black ink, depicting a forest of looming willow trees. At the end of each branch, there were eyes. Some starting to bloom, some fully open with horrific expressions, some rotting on the ground, the white running like the yellow of a broken egg. It was a piece of art, an instant success.

In college, these were harder years. It was a very selective fine art program and only fifteen people were invited for the duration of the curriculum. Unfortunately, the friends I had made initially dropped off after the first year. I should have done the same. For three years I found myself surrounded by nine poisonous women set to make my life miserable. The queen bee had immediate aversion for me and my work. In all modesty, I was the only one who really had talent. But from great, my work became guarded and lame. Afterward, I put my stuff away and never used it again until recently.

When I started working with John, I almost immediately felt this imperative need for painting. Unsure and still shaken by my college years, I decided to enroll in a night class. I thought that perhaps it would help me break the spell. It did, and soon after I started painting again. My paintings were just as intense as before, but this time they were full of color as well. My obsession turned towards women. All I painted were women busts, women with large vacant, unseeing eyes. I painted dozens of them if not more.

Last January, I found out that I had been sexually molested by my brother, and that my mother had witnessed some of it without ever intervening.

A few months later, I pulled out my old portfolio from storage. I was looking for something but I didn’t know what. I was driven by instinct. Then it dawned on me. Every painting, every drawings and sketches I ever made screamed as loud as it could that someone saw. That a woman saw what happened to me, a woman with eyes that refused to see. My mother did not want to see, she didn’t want to know what had happened to me, she would have had to do something about it.

All that time, somewhere at the back of my mind, I knew that something terrible had happened to me and that she knew about it all along. She could close her eyes tight, she could look the other way, but whether she liked it or not, she saw.