The Painter
I decided that I needed something to do in the evenings, other than watch TV or mess around with the Internet, so I joined an art class at a local college. I went along to the first lesson and sat around looking at the others and chatting with them: there were about a dozen of us, all ages from 50-ish to teenagers. All very good, I thought, but I was hoping for a GWG. Then right on cue one appeared: she was a tall, willowy girl with a fair, freckled complexion, a raging bunch of red hair tied behind her head and spraying out again onto her shoulders, not twenty by the look of her. She was casually dressed, but one thing that caught my eye, well I was hoping for a GWG, and so she certainly was: she wore this spectacularly thick pair of myodisk glasses, in bronze metal off-round frames that were set off by the delicate shape of her face. A pair of light blue eyes gazed through them around the room. She didn’t seem entirely certain of her surroundings, so asked me if this was the painting class: I confirmed that it was. She sat down next to me, and introduced herself. Her name was Emma, but I was so full of wonderment at the sight and thought of her thick lenses that I forgot her name and called her “Emily”.
The Art Teacher entered and began the lesson. She wasn’t very exciting, really, but that was OK, being as I had Emma to look at. She wrote some things that were needed on the board, such as paint, paper, brushes, etc. I noticed Emma peering through her glasses, which appeared to be in the minus 25 area of correction, but not writing anything down. I wondered if she were memorising it, but no, she pressed her glasses against her face and squinted a little. Then she peeked over my shoulder and started copying: I let her believe that I hadn’t noticed. It seemed certain that she had difficulty seeing into the distance. “Mmmm, interesting” I thought.
For the next lesson, the Art Teacher set up a still life for us to paint: it was some fruit in a bowl, not a very original subject, but to me, as a beginner, hard enough. I painted it very slowly. Emma got on with it much better. It was my turn to peek at her work: she had painted everything in a sort of loose, vague style. The Teacher remarked that it was “like Impressionism,” to me, the situation seemed much more obvious. There was little detail to the painting; where there was such, she’d depicted it inaccurately. The other thing I noticed was the way that her painting seemed crowded and too small in the middle of her page.
She saw me admiring her painting, and asked,
‘do you like it?’
‘Yes, its lovely.’
‘Thank you.’
She smiled, then turned her heavily corrected gaze back to the subject and squinted a little more. She then got up and left the room, presumably to use the toilet. I sat in front of her painting, looking at it and the distance between me and the subject. I thought “if this is how she paints it, then this is probably not far from how she sees it.” I was guessing a bit, but I thought her visual acuity had to be at least something like 20/100. Quickly I went back to my painting, but really, I couldn’t concentrate anymore. Whatever feeble skills I possessed deserted me and the result was pretty awful.
Well, for three weeks we sat next to each other, getting quite friendly, if nothing more. She had this fascinating penchant for wearing tight tops, I know that’s not unusual but she did look so appealing in them. Then the Christmas break came along, thus I did not see her for nearly a month. Then the lessons resumed, and we sat together again. I watched her painting a woman sitting in a chair, a model who had agreed to do this. The first thing I noticed about her painting was that she didn’t bother trying to guess the woman’s features, which was fair enough if you’re no good at faces; I thought that might be her excuse. But the other thing I noticed was that she hadn’t painted the white buttons on the woman’s dark blue dress. Now, call me finicky, but buttons are a lot easier to paint than faces.
The Art Teacher came to inspect our work: she commented on Emma’s,
‘you’re getting much more impressionistic, aren’t you? I love the blurriness of the painting. But, maybe you could have included some detail, like the buttons on her dress?’
Emma started to say,
‘wh…’
and then shrugged, and continued more lucidly,
‘oh, I like being as impressionistic as possible.’
‘Fair enough, I suppose.’
Emma had nearly given the game away; I tried not to reveal that I knew exactly what that game was.
Over the next couple of months I noticed that her paintings again seemed to become steadily fuzzier, if only by small degrees. Then one evening she sat beside me wearing her familiar bronze metal frames, but containing lovely new lenses: that was obvious because they were very clean and completely unscratched. She gently patted them against her face, and I began to wonder what her paintings would be like: it transpired that they were not so indistinct as previously, but still pretty fuzzy, it had to be said. I guessed her VA wasn’t far better than the 20/100 I’d guessed at when I’d first met her.
Things went on basically as before: she never asked what things were, but sometimes made approving noises about my paintings. Just before the Easter break, I decided to make an attempt at revealing to her that I knew what her problems were. Another still life came up; as I painted it, I let her look at it as often as she wished, which had been increasingly the case in recent lessons. I realised she was copying me! I deliberately put an extra handle on the largest saucepan that we were painting a set of, just to see what she’d do.
Sure enough, she glanced at it, and after a second glance started painting her own second handle on her version of the same! The paintings were nearly finished by then, anyway, and when the last time she wanted to look at my painting came around, I said,
‘oh, let me finish it, please.’
I painted out the extra handle, and then let her look. She glared at it, and then at me. She said sharply,
‘where’s the other handle?’
‘What other handle?’
‘You mean…you….’
With a glare she realised that I knew her secret. She did not speak to me for the rest of the lesson.
Fortunately, she then had the whole Easter break to get over it. When we reassembled in the art room, she was as friendly as ever. As the evenings had started to become brighter, the Art Teacher took us outside to paint things: not very far, to the car park in fact. Painting cars was not quite what I had in mind. Emma, of course, needed help with getting the number plates right: she had no hope on her own, but at least she was gracious enough to realise that I didn’t mean to embarrass her.
Spring gave way to summer, and thus we went outside more often to paint. The summer holiday was upon us, thus the painting class was dissolved until next term. The Art Teacher suggested to us that we try going out and painting things on our own. So, I invited Emma to go to some local woodland I knew to paint it. Emma’s eyesight by now had worsened to 20/150 VA, thus when she sat down to paint the trees and bushes around her, said jokingly,
‘is it OK if I just paint what I see? A green blur?’
‘Is that what you see?’
‘It’s not quite that bad. But in the distance, that’s it. I’d better try something nearer.’
All that afternoon she was asking me about things around her, along the lines of “does that look right?” And “how many branches are there on that tree?” I asked her if she had trouble with night vision: she told me that she had real problems seeing anything at night, which was just as I’d guessed. “No point asking her to paint at night, then,” I mused to myself. The results of her painting were very much indicative of her vision, despite her frequent resorts to my vision over hers: a kind of amalgam of her fuzziness with some detail here and there, some made up, some supplied by me.
I didn’t see Emma for the rest of the summer: she’d apparently gone on holiday, and when I started the next level up at painting, she wasn’t there. To be honest, I had too many things going on to make time for painting, so I gradually had to abandon my interest in it. I heard and saw nothing about Emma for about three years, but then one day I noticed an article in the local paper about her: it referred to her as a “blind painter”, which surprised me, being as when I’d last met her she was still in the realms of partial blindness. Could her vision had got that much worse? Apparently there was an exhibition of her work, so one Saturday I went along to look.
I went in the front door, paid the entry fee and looked around. All around me were paintings hanging on the walls: of course, they had the unmistakable Emma-style, which was fuzzy and generally lacking in detail. Then Emma came wandering out from behind a panel and looked at me, but didn’t recognise me at all. She’d had trouble before, but now, well, it was obvious that she had no idea who I was. She wore another pair of glasses: smaller and more ovoid in shape, with even thicker myodisk lenses than before, something getting on for minus 30, maybe more. She was forced to get appallingly close to me before I saw signs of recognition on her face: she was delighted that I’d come to see her exhibition. I complimented her on her work, which went down very well. She explained her myopia was minus 30 each eye, but her maximum worthwhile correction was only minus 29. Along with her existing poor Visual Acuity, it amounted to 20/200.
I immediately asked her out for a drink, and that was the start of a marvellous relationship, but that’s another story.