Alexi's Art Philosophy: May 2011

Past and present blur, haunting Doris.

A blue towel sends Doris into a fugue. She expects Will to walk around the corner, and for Lila to...No. Not Lila, Calla, whose small hands reach for the blue towel...Uses the ultra adsorbing cloth to wipe up water and paint.

Yes, Will hung a blue towel across the same easel bar, the same way, and Doris watched the bright blue become the faded, paint stained rag she recalled better than its newness. The gray-blue of the towel matches Will's eyes. Will favors the color blue, due to its mutability.

Calla, though, prefers red and black.

“Do you hear the people sing? Singing the song of angry men! It is the music of a people who will not be slaves again!” It has been years since Doris heard this song. Now, here is Calla, singing all the parts as she used to.

Decades merge. Doris places a blue rag into a coffin. Calla is just ten and she mourns her death, Eponine's alto her favorite... Lila's father strangled the perfect pitch out of her... but then, the ear for it remained, and reminded her as she shivered painfully while hearing discordance.

Calla doesn't share her parents musical aptitude. Her father plays every musical instrument well, as her mother had once sung each note perfectly. Calla sings despite her voice's mediocrity, and does not play any instrument.

“Red, the color of the dawn! Black, the night that is to end!”

Will's blue is subtle, awash in ambiguity, just as Will is. Only Art matters, and the forms... and that is what he pours himself into.

“Red, the color of desire! Black, the color of despair!”

Calla is bold, she is frank, she is open and warm. She is “more than”. More than alive. More real. More beautiful, more intelligent, more...strange and special than her mother Lila, or Will, even. The girl's even brushstrokes, her back to Doris, makes Doris retreat into her home.

Doris cannot sleep. Will keeps talking about the gallery- gone for decades- and Doris turns to find herself in a helicopter, piloted by wife-beater Ed... Calla sings of Cosette's clouds and white mothers in a grave voice.

A baby's shrill cry awakes Doris, but, there are no infants around.

“Calla's Gallery, Doris.” Will tells her in a soft voice behind the baby's pitiful, dying cries.

“What could I do?” Doris sobs. “He locked me in the room! Doped me up! Beat me, tied me to the bed!” And the baby stopped crying forever, then the hateful looks from her stepdaughter, who blamed Doris for not coming out of the room... for her father's transgressions. After all, had Doris kept Ed satisfied he wouldn't need to... And Doris's fugues made her as cruel and as dangerous as Ed. Pregnancy. A girl, then another... Ed liked the girl babies...

Despite managing to survive and escape with the children in a women-hating world, he now tormented her nights. Will came, and Jr, and Ed, as if Calla's first brushstroke broke a seal, summoning Doris's past...and judgments.

“...music of the people who will not be slaves again! When the beating of your heart echoes the beating of the drums...”

“Yes, it echoes.” Her heart beat painfully through her. “Was this how it was Will, the days weeks months before... This disorientation?”

III

Calla works on her first watercolor series. She calls it a collection. Black sheep Calla. Calla the outsider, the unwelcome stranger. Calla is distant. Something about her makes Doris feel funny. She breaks the rules, listening to her own council.

Calla's brushstrokes change her, of course. But does she see the small girl in a pinafore standing near Calla's easel? The child tugs at Calla's shorts, then plays hopscotch a moment before tugging on Calla's shorts again.

“Not now, I'm working.” Calla responds automatically.

The girl in the pinafore plays peek-a-boo with Adele, Calla's baby. The girl then scares Seb, Calla's son, by turning her form into a rotting zombie. Seb blames this spirit girl for all manner of troubles, some of which she is guilty of.

Doris keeps her hallucinations quiet.

Spirits come for Doris from the glass and the paintings. They step through and accuse her... She fears Lila will learn of these hallucinations and have her committed. It was something Lila and Vivian would do swiftly and with smug satisfaction.

But, Mars comes before stained glass studies, before assailants step out of pretend windows-

“And I love the reflection!” Doris exclaims, but really, the way it follows her is frightening.

But, the red planet's heat wave and Adele's birthday and Calla paints moon and Mars, over and again. Ten days of Mars and the sky at dusk, midnight, dawn. Watch Mars creep across Calla's canvasses.

Do the dogs bark more while Mars hangs next to the moon? Nervous birds chatter, deafening highway noise. Everything pains Doris's skin and head and eyes... She doubts the spectacle of so many shooting stars, yet Calla paints streaks of white gold, relieving Doris's sleep deprived mind.

Calla doesn't notice the absence of her collection. Oddly, the temporary burglary is Bearnard's doing instead of Doris's. Even though Will whispers the idea to Doris, Ed's torments and the baby's dying cries supersede Will, and when did Will ever do anything altruistic? His voice was a self-absorbed artist's... and he'd left her drowning in debt.

Did the nightmares worsen with Mar's advent? Doris feels weaker each day, and less aware. Even nap time dreams hurt. Mars fades and family vultures gather, unbeknownst to Doris. She calls the doctor another name, and does not remember his numerous visits. She calls her nurse Vivian, Lila, or Will. In her mind she is alone, the nurse is a phantom, another specter accusing her, another tormenter forcing her down.

“Rest, Miss, rest.”

Calla paints the stained glass Doris and Will designed onto canvasses. Out of the glass step images from the past, each one bearing secret horrors... Uncle Mikey ... Ed ... Jr. ... Pastor Jakeson...

“Lila!”

Doris falls; thud onto brick, into Calla's easel, which topples. Calla, turning at Doris's cry, sees Lila, her unknown mother. Lila's harsh laugh pierces Calla, who manages to shift her shocked gaze to Doris's inert form. Lila forever vanishes while Calla attends to her dead grandmother.

The End