Light on the Painting - THE JERICHO TRIGGER

Pontic Mountains, Turkey

IN THE MORNING, when tickled with first light purified by cathedral glass, the vision she had painted was correct, an earthly accent highlighting resolution. But then, when illuminated by a great candle chandelier hanging from a pyramidal ceiling of stone, light necessary at a minimum to begin seeing detail, her work stirred to life, becoming mesmerizing and increasingly complex, impossible to understand. That’s exactly what she wanted.
     Shades of gray pigment rendered in surrealism, her easy, untethered brush strokes had assembled numerous geometric rows of long, cylindrical objects, bold, silver-gray and crisp on one side of the mural-size canvas, muted, charcoal-gray, blurred and distorted, similarly echeloned in opposition on the other. Woven in between the objects was a massive steel-gray chain, an unseen force dramatically pulling on it, violently uprooting the cylinders against their structural will towards the center, meshing them together, while sequentially destroying them.

They were pointed shapes with fins, set against a chaotic pale taupe background of thick crumbling walls and collapsing buildings, burning with giant ash-gray flames of fire, and drenched in dark, arsenic-gray rain. In as many shades of gray, the artist had also painted numbers; binary code that fluttered from an inky sky, initially as single digit ones and zeros, before morphing into random numerals of multiple digits, that then transformed into summations and equations, with fractions, Greek letters and symbols in brackets and parenthesis, and in various sizes and forms. Some of these formulations were wavy block, some vague cube, some sharp flat, overlaying the work, floating arbitrarily in space before taking on a unique perspective of their very own. And lastly, at the linear vanishing point of the bleak scene was one large eye, with the pupil dilated and fixed, leaving a thin iris rim of glaucous and blue-gray.

Watched by five unlit klieg lights perfectly positioned on the spotlessly swept stone floor beneath it, spaced exactly three and a half feet apart, the swirling painting, six by fourteen feet, was mounted on wooden stands against the granite wall of a large, four-sided room. The room was reinforced with dark mahogany throughout, and decorated with four large windows of multicolored, antique glass, symmetrically patterned, designed to catch most of the day’s sun. Once a chapel, but empty of ornaments as a result of looting from previous centuries, the drafty space, which had a distinct amplified echo, was at the center of a medieval Christian Monastery perched high on the western face of a craggy Turkish cliff.

The timeworn sanctum had become the artist's studio, a refuge to paint, as well as her place to study and learn. A plain wooden desk, two wooden chairs, and the tools of an artist were all that now furnished the room. And there, created amid the bouquet of the artist’s solvents, mixed with humid currents of cool air meandering through dark corridors with vaulted ceilings, the large painting was just one representation, a single chapter in an expanding volume of the artist’s impressions of the struggles of the human race, the totality that is the essence of not only the evolution of mankind, but the discovery of the rules of the universe itself.

It was a layered postulation of murky oils made with grizzled paintbrushes and pallet knife, and with the floating numbers and formulas, the essence of a theorem, perhaps verifying something, but solving nothing. And with those complexities and likely conundrums, the composition had managed to produce substance and achieve analytic life. Yet, could her analysis be fearful, a gloomy, surreal projection in mural form?

From the start, as geniuses before her, she was a cerebral vacuum, and painting was her resulting quasar. Through art she’d discovered a cathartic outlet, her artistic creations being a veritable spinoff for a voracious, super black hole of intellectual appetite. An apt juxtaposition with inflation of the universe at the jumpstart of the Big Bang, a favorite subject of hers’, the expansion of her grasp rapidly inflating, her mind was dissecting accepted theories, often uprooting the basis of their foundations with original and revolutionary proofs of her own, the state of being versus what will become. In her own scale of Planck Time, she was devouring all that was discoverable or ever dreamt possible to imagine, and finding not only the known unknown, but also that never before imagined – the unknown unrevealed secrets of the universe.  

Her curiosities ranged widely from language and art, to philosophy, math, and especially physics; lately on studies most would consider to be obscure, certainly very small. The deep inquisitive interest she developed for things was aroused by the magical, or what appeared to be supernatural, that is until truly investigated, and explained scientifically. The compass, magnates, fireflies at dusk, had all captured her curiosity at one time or another. And now she was captivated by a brilliant, silver-gray metal called uranium. 
     She'd become preoccupied with the element at first for its shiny color, which reminded her of mercury, quickly becoming more engrossed because of its unique behavior. From her studies she's learned that contained within uranium were dormant forces, at rest since the birth of the universe, and that when sparked and unleashed, those forces were exceptional to behold. Inside this gray metal, where things are a billion times smaller than she, was an isotope, another form of uranium able to sustain a fission chain reaction unleashing enormous, mind-boggling energies similar, she knew, to that of the sun. She also knew that the power released from that dormant energy could be used for good, or for bad.

On one hand it could be used as an energy source with unlimited potential, such as powering an entire city of millions of people, and on the other hand for weapons with terrible destructive power, "Weapons of mass destruction," many called them, capable of instantly vaporizing that very same city along with all of those people. She had also discovered that nowadays the use of fission from uranium alone was considered primitive, and weapons had long ago evolved to thermonuclear, a type of bomb the world’s superpowers each had tens of thousands of. But it started with uranium, and when enriched with enough quantity, an equalizer for those who weren’t superpowers, and without question, a means of terror.

Therefore because of those particular truths, many conventionally powerful regimes, some frightening and bellicose, were just as obsessed as she was with uranium, the radioactive element that made it all possible. She just looked at it differently than they did. A sweep with the paintbrush here, and a stroke with the paintbrush there, represented a myriad of her original feelings, analysis, and predictions. That’s how she worked.

Climbing down from a wooden stool on which she’d stood for those final sweeps and strokes, the artist looked at her mother, who while admiring the work steadied the stool. With her brush, she pointed at the forbidding cylindrical shapes. “They're missiles,” she said with a gaping smile revealing a missing tooth, a lateral incisor.

“I can see that,” her mother answered with a smile in return, placing an elegant hand on her daughter’s ponytailed head, the hair satin coffee just as hers’.

Gliding her hand softly down the fair face, squaring it to her own, produced a gleam from the girl’s luminous hazel eyes. The mother gently held the tiny chin, lifting it to examine the still fixed beam closely. “Hmm, well look at that. You have another new one coming in, don’t you?”

The girl nodded silently, probing the space with the slide of her tongue. “Est-il à votre gout – is it to your liking?” she asked turning her head to eye the painting.

“Yes – yes it is,” the mother answered, her undeterred doting gaze coming from unusually wide orbits, a Bouvier-esque mild ocular hypertelorism and downturned eyes just far enough apart to make her appearance uncommon, yet uniquely alluring and beautiful. The condition was hereditary and the daughter just the same.

“S'il vous plait Karen. You’re just saying that, aren’t you?”  the daughter teased, injecting her new favorite language, accented as well, into the subtle ribbing, especially rolling the r of her mother’s name.  Oui oui Kareen. They'd been on a first name basis for several months, an informality that Karen was initially startled by, but had now grown accustomed to. Although things were becoming different, Karen knew that she would always be a mother in a traditional sense, especially for those few things that remained routine and natural. There was the nurturing and caring as all loving mothers instinctively possess, but primarily in being the guardian, and of that she was devoted, which gave her great comfort. 

“Don’t be silly. Of course I’m not. I love all of your work,” Karen giggled, shifting her attention to the painting, her thumb on chin, forefinger crossing full lips.

“Well you don’t sound very positive. Maybe you need to see it a little better.”

“Alright – I’m trying,” the mother said, her eyes narrowing as they darted across the canvass.

“Pensez positif ma chère Karen. Oui - think positive please, you need to really see it. Here, I can help you,” the girl said, continuing her French intonation and nodding at a black button a step or two away on the floor. A black electrical cord was attached to the button, and the cord connected to a transformer, and in turn to a wire whorl that led to a generator.

The mother did as instructed, and upon lifting her foot off the button, she could feel a sudden vibration to her core. A low hum simultaneously increased in pitch as the five klieg lights began to flicker and turned on, and within moments the cold room was very warm, and awash in reflected colors from one end of the spectrum to the other.

Eyes opened wide, her tall, thin frame rigid, the mother caught her failed breath, forcing a murmur, “I…” She couldn’t finish, the words of expression had vanished, so instead said nothing and just looked.

“You can see it now, can’t you?”

“Yes,” Karen breathed with the faintest of a whisper. 

“Tell me if you like it now.”

“I’m…” Karen tried.  

“I knew you would like it,” the little girl said with a slight one-sided grin.

Her mouth filled with saliva produced by an over stimulated nervous system, Karen swallowed, clearing her throat to ask in a barely audible tone, “What are you going to call it?”

“It doesn’t have a name yet.”

“Is it finished?”

Taking a few steps back and folding her arms, brush gripped in her small hand, the little girl pursed her lips, squinted and studied. “Oh yes,” she finally said after a long silence. “It’s finished.”

“Then sign it untitled,” Karen said, finally snapping the hold of the painting. With a slight tremble she handed her daughter a pallet knife that the child took. “You can decide on a name later,” she added nervously.

Scraping and scooping from a pallet of oils, using titanium white for petals, cadmium green for filament, she briskly fashioned a flower in the bottom right corner of the painting. Then with a sharp pin and a prick of her finger, she added the stamens. That was her signature, Lily. 

VENICE

    We met in Venice.

    “Venezia,” she corrects me in song. She’s right. The old city’s name is more agreeable when spoken in Italian, with accents of course, similar to singing, and especially when sung by her. If I'd forgotten the correct, most appealing way to say it, the proper elocution, finished with an exotic flair, well – all I had to do was just take one look at this beautiful woman. The allure of the city on water, the flowing notes of the name, finished with exhale of pleasure, was the exact essence of her.
    “Come darling. Follow me,” she said softly and smiled. “Back to Venezia.” So I took her hand, and now here we are again.