The Pleasure In The Paint

I'd never met a painter before.

When I was a child I met a secretary, a doctor, a pharmacist, a cashier, a firefighter, a police officer, an actress, a musician, and only once: a writer.

Artists were entities that existed outside of the suburbs.

We'd gone to museums, of course, but only the ones that displayed artifacts, none of which beckoned my curiosity.

This too, I thought to myself, looking at a red clay urn, must be an acquired taste.

Fine arts was not yet a part of our curriculum.

My education was not--I can now see--intensive.

The first time I went to the museum was with a friend I'd met at the university, where I was seriously struggling in my second year studying psychology, a girl whose last name has changed since the last time I saw her.

We got high and dreamily looked at the high walls.

For years afterwards I would recreate this scene, none as striking as the initial encounter, but almost just as good.

It wasn't the art itself but the experience of experiencing it.

She was darker skinned, but perhaps the most stunning of all the ones I have seen. She was beautiful in the classical sense. Even when she wore make-up I did not notice a great difference, since there was no need to accentuate her features, to merely accent them, deepen the lines, was enough. She wasn't sexy: she was sensual. She was a girl who grew up with class and remained classy. The thing about her intelligence was that no one needed to question it--in any room she was in she was the smartest, no matter that she was never prepared like everyone else, she didn't need to, in fact, all the knowledge had been absorbed at the moment of ingestion. She really was one of those people who could do anything she applied her mind to. She was never not occupied, but when you were in her life, and you gave her enough notice, she would always make room for you. She partook in illegal activities but was also the most devout person I knew. She had deep faith, never touted it. She was not vulgar. If I was reincarnated as a woman, and had a choice in who I might become like, I would, no doubt, choose her. She seemed so strong; I never saw her cry. She always knew what to say. She was a good person who liked to get high on Sunday afternoons.

But she was a lesbian.

I tried to hold her hands, twice, and kiss her, once, but each time she kindly rejected my advances, and then spent the rest of the evening teasing me about my inability to restrain myself from amorousness.

"I'm not going to apologize to you for how I feel," I said.

"You don't have to," she replied. "But keep it inside."

What was she keeping inside; and from whom?

The supposed impossibility of our union didn't stop me from continuing to entertain the idea, wasting my days thinking about a dream that would never come true.

I wanted her to see me without clothes.

I was proud of my chest, my pecs, my arms, my flat, hairless stomach, the size of my cock, the thinness of my bush, the thickness of my thighs, the deep definition on my claves, my big feet, my maintained, odorous toes.

All the women she dated were grossly under-toned.

If she paid attention to my body more closely, I thought then, maybe she would change her mind, betray her personal belief, conviction, and pounce.

She never did.

She graduated, married, had a child, and didn't even ask me to be a sperm donor, which I justified as having to do with her particular interest in my family history of cancer.

Every time the topic of a diagnosis or a death arose, she asked questions, intently listened.

We drifted apart because our lives diverged when I dropped out at the end of that barely passed year.

The thing we had in common--school--was gone and so was our reason for being together.

I returned to the museum, but alone, and there a docent began to speak to me, we engaged in a conversation about the artist Joan Mitchell, she told me that she'd trained in New York at Christie's, and I told her about my time in Venice encountering my first painting by Agnes Martin, whom she evidently did not know much about.

At one point she was really intent on recalling the name of a black artist featured in a magazine article, and I mostly attributed this to the fact that I was coloured.

What she could remember, though, as I finished my interpretation of "The Rose," was that the museum was offering a class for amateur artists, and it seems, she said, "like you are interested in making art. Have you ever thought of taking a class?"

Since I was out-of-work for the time being, and had enough in my savings, I signed up for a class that day: every Wednesday for six weeks: abstractions; which, ironically, took place in a concrete building.

The teacher, a painter herself, was named Berenice.

On the first day I asked her if she'd ever read the play and she looked me up and down--how does this coloured boy know such a thing--and said: "No. But I've been asked that question before. Should I?"

There were only three other students there that day and, evidently, she'd structured our time so that there was still space for a more, I guess, intensive introduction.

"No," I said. "It's dated. But it's cool that you share a name with a literary character."

"And what is your name," she asked.

"Ishmael," I said.

As a warm-up we did abstract self-portraits, which mainly just produced imitations of Van Gogh, Picasso, and the Snoopy cartoons.

I'd painted the edges of my medium-sized canvas with pink and purple and blue then covered most of the canvas in a grey matter.

Berenice, and the other three, stopped at my easel and asked me to explain.

"I feel," I started, "that who I am on the inside and how everyone on the outside perceives me is out of my control, which is the grey, but the parts of me that I know to be integral to who I am resides at the edges, not taking up space, but nonetheless framing, containing the mass. I'd like to think of those colours as my feelings, my memories, and my sensibilities."

"It is very Jasper Johns," she said.

"Yes," I said. "That is who I was thinking of. He was friends with Joan Mitchell and Agnes Martin, you know?"

"I didn't know that," she said, looking directly into my eyes for the first time. "Why is your paintbrush still in your hand?"

I looked down, and hadn't realized it.

"I don't know," I replied. "I guess I'm not finished with painting it yet. Can I take it home to work on it?"

"Yes. But you have to bring it back."

I said, "I will, Berenice."

Stunned by my direct address, she rotated on her toes.

"What I want for each of you by the end is to not imitate another artist," she said.

My cheeks flushed; I, too, had been unoriginal!

She continued, "I want you to develop your own style while you're here. Abstraction is what happens when the mind rids itself of all the influences and influences itself. It is what happens when a person thinks for themselves, as though a non-verbal infant, without a mother tongue. I should be able to see that a part of you was silenced in the process of making the piece, and to see it in the minutia of the work. You have to make me look and lead me to see myself in a thing that has no resemblance to me."

For the first time in a long time I was excited.

How did I, of all people, end up here of all places?

After the other students left, as she was cleaning up her mess, I stared at my canvas.

"What are you thinking about," she asked.

"I'm wondering if it would be too much to have a stroke of colour in the centre."

She came up behind me, pressed her groin to my ass.

I felt the blood immediately rush to my cock.

"What would the stroke represent," she asked, her hands grazing my thighs.

"I was thinking it could mean love," I said.

"Then it would be white."

"But earlier you said white is not a colour."

"Then red."

"So violent."

"Yellow?"

"Urine."

"Brown?"

"Shit."

"I like shit."

"Who doesn't like shit," I ironically asked.

She removed her hands from my thighs--I could feel the warmth of her touch long after its departure--and I turned around.

She took the paintbrush from my hand.

The room door was closed, there were no windows.

"Turn around," she said. "And take off your pants...your underwear too."

This was all done very slowly so that by the time I was nude I was fully erect. I felt her gaze upon my flesh. It hadn't ever occurred to me that a woman would be interested in my backside. It was never on my list of assets. Was it adequate? A few seconds later I felt the backside of the brush touch the top of the line that bisected my cheeks. Gradually she ran the back of the brush down that line and several shivers ran up my spine and a glob of clear liquid--which I'd always understood as a sign of true excitement--travelled down the base of my cock. Up and down she went until the entire area felt as though it were positively tingling. Then she tried to stick the tip into my rectum but it instinctually tightened, refusing it.

"Am I going to have to break you in," she asked.

She walked away, I looked up, followed her to her desk where a tub of petroleum jelly rested. She brought it back. The glob of seminal fluid had since exited my cock and collected in the fabric of my underwear. My cock was hard yet still I felt so conflicted. She applied the jelly to the tip of the brush and rubbed it up and down the shaft. Suddenly I was grateful that I'd chosen a rather thin brush instead of the fat one used in kindergarten. And without notice really, like a doctor injecting a nervous patient, she inserted the back of the back into my rectum. My cheeks were flushed.

It hurt. It felt uncomfortable. As she twirled it around a bit the searching felt as though it might prick flesh. She started to pull it in and out slowly at first then very quickly thereafter. I let out a few pathetic wails, if there was pleasure in the act I still wasn't feeling it, but it was quite hot.

Is this what it felt like, I thought, for a woman to lose her virginity?

How invasive, how ambivalent.

Who was the one that was really receiving the pleasure in this situation?

"You like that," she asked, thrusting it deeper than she had before.

The voice in my head said: pain is pleasure!

I wasn't sure about that anymore!

"Yes," I managed to tentatively utter.

"Shit," she said.

"Shit," I asked.

"Not shit," she said: "Blood."

I turned around, pulled up my underwear and my pants and stared at the slightly bloody tip of her brush.

"Shit," I said.

"You'll be fine," she replied.

I thought I was going to die just then from an infection.

She couldn't bring herself to look me in the eyes.

She walked over to my canvas and wiped the blood and jelly off it, in the very middle.

"What are you doing," I asked.

"It's called the painter's finishing touch," she said.

I stared at the canvas one more time, feeling the blood collect in the fabric of my underwear. Perhaps blood would be my chosen material, I realized. If the women artists painted from the libido then I would paint directly from the anus. But no one would have to know that this was a part of my practice: only the artist knows their truth. This could be the language I expressed myself. For every artist, then, the art itself is never abstract: everything we do, consciously or subconsciously, is an act of communicating with the world.