Belinda Hearn
S
he’s in the kitchen skewering lumps of tasty cheese onto toothpicks, the only way the boy likes them. The kettle whistles in chorus with the boy. Another one vying for her all-encompassing attention. His shrill wail and the screeching kettle pop her ears as she pushes at her tired eyes with baby-shit-scented fingers. Nudging rubbery egg around a skillet, its handle hanging on by a single screw. The egg pops, oil flicking up and searing her cheek, but she doesn’t flinch. Her lethargic mind is busy playing with ideas dying at conception.
A grand piece. One she fantasies about on good days. Permeant rose and Prussian blue. Alizarin red. Geometric shapes with no regard for light and shade. The boy is sick with a chest infection, leaving no room for personal space. Grabby hands raised, perched in his high chair. Yellow snot bubbling in his nostrils. She can’t get out to the city where her husband now sits, in his ludicrously expensive studio, share paid by the boys of abstraction. A place of testosterone driven chatter, where male artists pour over Pollock and de Kooning. Her studio is now a boxy corner in the family garage and it is as lifeless as her practice. No space to make the grand gestures she has painted in her thoughts even if she had the time to make them. Once, he and she thought they’d spin the art world together. A time she was a part of the abstraction men. Fertile amongst them. Throwing paint and watching dribbling canvasses for signs of truth. Before her body blew up and spat forth a replica for them both. The boy tore the bristles from the brush she’d bought in Paris in 1993. A lush collection of white sable strands held together with a glistening copper ferrule. Tufts of silvery hair strewn across the worn charcoal carpet like clean clouds pushing against a furious sky. A decapitation of her artistry. She hadn’t lifted a stick of charcoal or pushed a brush through a swirl of paint since its demise. She yearns for the toxic hit of solvent and the punchy aroma of oils. Her husband would be zonal now, buoyant in the chaos of making. Taking his self-indulgent time to delve deeply into weighty masculine art history and working through it in his own magnificent way. A place in which he nestles into creation through the up and down of the sun. A success. Respected. Given space. A place where no thought of home permeates his critically acclaimed success. Her Winsor & Newton paints sit in her dog house studio, but whenever she plans to squeeze them, when the noise maker is finally asleep, her body is drawn back into a now permanent dent she has carved for herself on the family couch. All thoughts of shape and shade and colour and texture will be devoured by exhaustion. When he comes home, he’ll tell her what he made and she will smile. He’ll fuck her then and she will think of dishes, washing and violin lessons, and when he comes, she won’t, but she will sleep long and restlessly soon after and dream of a revival.
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