cadmium yellow, or an ocher, or perhaps a rose pink. Virtually all of it will be covered by layers of other colors eventually, but somehow the brightness still shows through and resonates, like a visual echo. Also, I find that if I begin with a canvas that only has white priming on it, the painting starts out on too light a key, since everything you apply initially looks too dark against the white.”
She shot him a look. “Bored yet?”
“Keep trying.”
“Right. So then I just start painting.”
She shrugged, then grinned.
He slumped in his chair.
“All right; if you insist. So then it's a process of building layers of color and, in a sense, light. I like to think of it as light broken by a prism, or maybe a fractured prism. The idea is to create an almost distilled, saturated light with the pigment.”
“How do you create light from paint? I don't get that.”
“It's partly technique; I lay a small amount of several pigments on the palette, and when I mix my final colors, I really thin them. Sometimes they're almost transparent. And then I build up layers. I'm working with a range of colors—they would seem too powerful on their own, but when I apply them thinly, they turn out soft, almost gauzy. After many, many layers of individual brushstrokes—I never use a palette knife in these pieces—it's as if the painting begins to glow. I've left some of the ground thinly covered, so that it shows through in places, tying the composition together, but primarily it's the color layers that create that softness. And I scrumble with my finger a lot.”
“I don't even want to ask what that's about,” Andrew cracked.
She laughed once, hard, then swiped back. “Get your mind out of the gutter, you creep. ‘Scrumbling’ is a way of blending the colors you've applied next to one another; it softens the effect, makes them—I don't know—more real at the same time as it muddies them. Some people use a blunt brush, or a bit of rag. I use my middle finger.”
“Do you have a clear idea of what you want to create when you begin?”
“No … and yes, in a sense. I'm trying to capture the grace of the natural world. I think most people have lost touch with it. They don't ‘see’ anymore. It's like they move through the world but aren't part of it. And don't even get me started on cell phones. Or iPods.”
She paused for a moment and stared out the window. Andrew followed her gaze.
“Look. Look at the way the setting sun scatters color across the sea, and tints the slopes leading down to it. It's not just yellow on the blue-green; it's so much more. On a night like this, when there's a fog bank or a haze or something out to sea, the light is filtered, gentle. Except where the cliffs cast hard shadows, everything is softened. The world is suffused with mauves and violets. Blues like lobelia and others like Hidcote lavender. A touch of rose and apricot on the waves, where the water catches the western light. The blue-black of the cliffs, except along the western edges, where they luminesce. The way Roger's fields pick up the last light and the grass goes from green—what is green, really; so many things—the way it goes from green to gold, especially at the very tips of the blades of grass, as if each were a tiny torch, a beacon … the last holdouts against the night.”
Andrew said nothing. He was mesmerized. He was used to seeing the world as composed of structures, not of colors. He felt as if he'd been given sight, or at least a new way of seeing.
“Anyway, in the end, all those thin layers of paint seem somehow to refract light differently, softly, a little like that haze out over the sea.”
“Nicola, I can't image how you make that happen, or how long it must take.”
She laughed. “It takes forever, but that's because I keep at the painting as long as it's in the studio. I keep seeing things, keep adding layers. I don't know how to let go. It isn't until the client pushes me to deliver that I do, and even then I don't want to.”
“And that totally different painting of Lee?”
“That's me, too. I haven't completely abandoned figurative works.”
“I guess I meant that I wondered what you'd do with that painting.”
“It's meant to be an anniversary present for Anne and Roger, but I'm having