Catherine Hobbs

Flakefloconflakefloconflakeflocon. Like a mare’s tail... [Rattle. Clack!] ...then a wing brushing the pane. The snow deepens (now even deeper) in the street below me. On the sidewalk, a transport driver is trying to push my neighbour in her wheelchair from his minivan to her front door. He slips. I worry for a moment but then I see her husband coming out to help. He reaches the others and the three joined figures gradually make it up the ramp by their front steps. Now the van grinds slowly through the ruts on the road, spinning its wheels to make the corner. Then. Again. Just snow. Remember printed snow on Christmas cards? Sometimes blue and green sparkles!

I breathe in and return to my work. Here in the front room, the light is good even on this sort of day.

[Settles, picks up a medium brush]

In the National Portrait Gallery in London there’s a painting of Judi Dench. She’s an almos-thalf-rendered figure in a cream coat with short grey-white hair, standing in front of simple white. Her soft clothes mute her body. She is at the ready, about to speak, eyes very dark, and the world seems to fade to white around her. According to the news, Dench is gradually going blind. Whiting out is becoming how she sees the world. An inversion of sight. But this image is unhesitating or lucid in a way portraiture has often done it. You were meant to get it (or pocket the little mystery), marvel and go home refreshed. Hmm. Though I have nothing against this image or the sitter (wonderful actress who recently played Q in the mega-tacular Bond films), it’s this lucid fading I have an issue with. Whose story is like that? Fading doesn’t resolve compactly into tales.

In my mind, white engulfs her. Although here at home I am not sure if that really is the case. London. A place you could go to avoid blankness. I suppose I could go (when there is no there inside...).

[Hand pulls a slow, deliberate line on the canvas]

To have had a red, then a yellow and then a blue phase... ...but life isn’t that simple or decorous. Mine anyhow.

In a painting white brings light to it. Light can be adventurous dabbling ...dappling. I have tried to keep a feeling of whiteness-lightness. Always struggling.

[Sweep down the canvas to give a bright sheen of light coming in a doorway]

The un-colour of white. Every school kid beyond a certain age can tell you that white is not a colour. It is the sum of all colours.

[Dab and pause]

I remember a show of thick-painted panels by Borduas years back in the contemporary gallery here in Montreal. Blacker-than-black shining gobsmears and white pallet-knife sweeps. Movements stuck forever. Suspended. Trying to annul any challenge to their own continuance even though they were cracked with age. [Removes a tiny smear with a rag.]

In my head, I see myself twenty-five again. At that time, I made meticulous pencil drawings of my own hands. They touched the white. Cream white. Dream white light. (Against? Night.)… .

..Don’t evade your personal vagueness. Light travels to our time from extinct times and our white, receptive vagueness reflects this light at its own speed.

[Hand dabs again]

Feel it. Feel the transparence of nothing. Veiled lightness. Living brightness evasive as ever all around. [Window clatters again rhythmically with the wind-smacks]

White noise. Paradoxical idea. Like today as snow dilutes the city and its feeder roads... …then the surrounding suburbs and fields after that. Some Japanese screen paintings leave white as negative space (plain gesso?); edging against the image or hanging delicately to evoke mist in the foothills. In many portraits it is the whites of the eyes that make one look. People who talk endlessly about film would mention Citizen Kane right away or go on about cinematic chiaroscuro. Ack!

I could dissolve away. Like an elegant film fade-out.

I don’t. Still here after almost eighty years!

[Shifts and picks up smaller brush]

Viewer you want me to tickle you, don’t you? Entice you in. Make you feel something pure? What is that, anyhow? Another version of feeling wholly justified? Or validated by receiving (wafer-on-the-tongue style) the best of the best? Rigid? Puritanical? At the same time gluttony?

But what emphasis? Last century Malevich, Ryman and Rauschenberg all famously painted monochrome white paintings. Malevich focussed on abstract form. Rauschenberg made statements about the panels reflecting or responding to light and atmosphere, so you could ‘almost tell how many people were there in the room around them’. Ryman claimed to be working with “real light and space.” But all of these things can be true. At the same time!

A few years ago, I hung up my blue overall and began using a white lab coat so I would not cast colour on what I was painting. Of course a painting depends on all the available light and the hues of things around it. [Hand continues to work in details]

Edith Sitwell had a garden with all white blooms, I think I remember. And Victorians like Keats famously misunderstood that the Greeks made their marbles a detached, gracious white. Whitewashing our thoughts… …and all these people now blanking out their teeth!

White oils or acrylics can be made choppy. Like tiny pieces of whitefish or feathers. Or that flashing Van Dyck pearl... ...which is mostly grey. Sometimes, I intuit grey is a warmer, more hospitable un-colour. Although as a concept, it is insulted.

That cat, Véro. Grey pixie face. Tiny pointed teeth. Caught a mouse and tossed it high into the air. Maybe ten feet up!

I focus vaguely on the thick snow continuum behind the window. The optic effect of staring at a white wall too long brings out colours. Shadows. Movement. I’m never certain if it is just my eyes or that, if I strain enough, I can fix the edges of what is really there.

Snow blindness...

…my memory for names now also very vague.

The mirror in this painting lies flat. No reflection. When I placed it down on the table earlier, I caught a glimpse of my father’s double chin (as sometimes happens). Yeck!

[Pauses. Resumes painting.]

It was around ’65. Yes. Richard smiling in the waves. Striped swim trunks. Navy and white. Walking close to him that day, there was a vibrating, pulsing cycle between my muscles, my circulation, my brain circuitry and his simply being there. His firm existence.

It was almost an arranged meeting for me (in fact, that time) because I had known he was going to be there. When I read the participants list for the artists’ residency at Yaddo, blood had rushed up to my face. All arrival day, I had my feelers out. There! I stopped before going into reception because I heard his voice poking out above the others. It resonated off the wood where I was in the grand porch. (Breathe and walk in.) Richard’s chest massive, fuller. A memory then of us as teenagers: he so many heads taller than most of the class. His grin. His breath when we collapsed in laughter after smoking half a cigar. And he had kissed me, tongue like a pile of burning leaves.

Art school. In my peripheral vision, his mass emitted a charge from the corner of life drawing class. The model was curved like a classical discus thrower with immaculately defined muscles along his buttocks and front-facing thigh. Richard and I danced through each other throughout those years. And it propelled raw instinct in my painting, so I gradually built my style on this confidence of more.

One Saturday during the residency he invited me to go with him to Rhode Island. Cool wind. Goose bumps; holding his stomach muscles in because of the cold; torso curving forward over his bulging trunks. Very bright. I sunblind, stunned, staring. He walked back up the beach to me. Felt his heat close. Still afraid, touched his hand for a moment... …And later, he in a coarse fishing sweater grinning. He had many things to say that had seemed so freed from convention.

But that evening when we returned, Richard coolly faced the woman who had just walked up to him familiarly (she in a boat neck white dress, elegant hair piled) and he slipped a hand across behind her to rest it on her far hip. The blood drained back out of my face. I had mistaken him. Ultimately, it was my poor judgement; a long lineage of misjudgements of the situation over almost twenty years. There was no one, really, on the other side. No more. He retreated (worming back underground) and shifted back to something more expected. “Yvonne, this is “J.T. My friend from school.” Banal. It was her youth and the appeal of simplicity, I suppose. Hurts even now. My secret skin cut through once and that was enough.

With Edward twenty years later, there was only miscomprehension. Warm, supportive, balsawood homogeneity and lightness too while we lived together. But nothing to grip. Wasting dilution. And a vague feeling of “don’t”.

[Sighs without hearing] Now I can’t bring myself to connect with expectations. What happens, though, if an artist appears to do almost nothing? Possibility is also the possibility of nothing. Struggle to do is also the possibility that it may not turn out. Or may not turn out exactly right. Then there is the silence that some people see as failure which is sometimes only obscurity. I love words like “obscurity”. It implies a simple vantage point complicated by some sort of enveloping fog.

[Resumes painting] At my gallery now, they treat me like an elegant relic: a finely aged version of the artist who has managed somehow to keep going all these years. Their website calls me “well respected” and “inventive”, and describes my interiors as “meditative and luminous.” They are very polite, certainly. I think this is because my figurative work still sells even though they clearly feel my style has been superseded. Once, though (I still can’t forgive the first owner this; too predictably charming, he was), they lost one of my panels. Because I was reaching sixty, I felt trapped or tied to the gallery. As part of the renegotiation, I accepted continuing with them if they supported a retrospective and a major loan. So my series’ appeared for a season at the Musée: Lilies; Fluorescence/Luminescence; Invisible Portraits; Silica and Simple White.

After that, it took a long time to get back to it. Deep corrosion set in for a while. Toxicity. Mouth full of ash, I took tiny white pills. But I wasn’t done. After almost a year, I eventually recovered.

Light around us saps away and then unexpected plenitude or lightness returns. A balance or some sort of interchange. But illumination? I’m sceptical. Shock, strength, dilution. Sometimes luminescence (instead of luminous): light without heat.

And… …final stroke of the day, I’d say. Keep it deliberate but gentle. (Voilà).

[Rubs forehead with the back of wrist and puts down brush. Looks once more out the window and onto the street. The snow is higher; the ruts in the road much shallower (now only subtle tracery). Turns, walks toward the door. Flicks off the lights and leaves the room.]

The painting depicts an empty easel with a bright reflection along one leg, created by the light entering through a doorway on the right-hand side. Brushes and paint tubes (white with coloured strips on their ends) lie on a table in the middle. Also on the table, the mirror is lying flat. Its reflective surface, dulled, faces up. There’s a feeling that a figure has just left through the doorway. And the strongest white here (Yes!) is outside the window. A seething flow with something muscling behind it.

Born in England, Catherine Hobbs was raised in Hamilton, Ontario and has lived in Chelsea, Quebec since 2001. She studied literature, philosophy and archives, and she has spent time in India, Israel and the West Bank. In 2017 Catherine was the first writer from outside New York to read at Amplit Fest, Riverside Park, Manhattan and two of her stories received Honorable Mentions in the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition. Catherine works as a literary archivist and is known for her articles on personal and literary archives. She is editing her first novel, The Remainder in a Momentary Landscape.

Want to read more Funicular? Subscribe once. Forever.