Still-life

For G

The orange looks like moonscape under the magnifying glass, a grainy pitted sphere. Maybe once, in another incarnation, smooth as glass like ice before skaters. Now, pierced and re-pierced, the voodoo totem of a demented spirit. The color is surprisingly even. Unnatural. Someone once told Maud that oranges are injected with dye commercially to make them undeniably orange. Yellow-green pallor wouldn’t do: no customer would cast a second glance.

Abutting the orange, broccoli: phallus-hard and self-assured rising to delicate floral clusters, like male rising to female. Beside the broccoli, the orange seems paunchy: someone’s old uncle, a soft wide lap to sit on. The light glancing off orange skin makes broccoli pulse evergreen, the deep green of trees that have seen some time. Maud envisions a forest of broccoli stems rooted into the pitholes of the orange skins.

My, how still-life has possibilities.

Cluster of grapes, dull red bulbous fruits, fencing off the orange and broccoli spears on one side. A few strays have dislodged, rolled to the edge of the broccoli where they’re piled and nested like brooded eggs. Languid collection: the bunch reclining, taut skins over formless pulp, stems lost to flesh but for one branch where the skeleton protrudes.

I’ve known people like that. And if you pick away at them, grape by grape, you can get to the bottom of them, and sometimes you’re surprised.

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From the bottom of the ocean, Nature’s filigree: coral. Another skeleton. This one, chosen for its mushroom shape, Maud finds exquisite. You can almost see spores that aren’t there, smell must, dirt, old bedding of leaves. Its rose color is early morning. Under the magnifying glass — BLOW UP! — fine bas relief is catacombs, inner city polyp territory: another set of unimaginable lives.

More history and filigree in the tablecloth, scavenged at a garage sale. The cloth, old hand work, has a few places in need of repair; is blemished with several faint stains. Maud uses it as is: reproduces it — the holes, the stains — exactly, to calcify memory. To catch the viewer unawares: provoke him, make her wonder just what got spilled and when, what fork skewered the lacy pattern and, wrenched free, rent it. Maud delights in the thought, however unlikely, that the original creator or owner of the table cloth, or someone habitually gathered around the table it dressed, would see her painting, recognize the cloth through the faithful rendering. Few viewers could be affected like that. Maudie, Maudie, fantasize the interchange, the reminiscences, the gratitude. The outrage: Ms. Buchanan, you’ve used our tablecloth without permission; have not properly credited nor remunerated us; paint it out or we’ll sue. Maud leaves the studio on days like that.

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The background. So-called. Matrix of these collected (carefully!) and scrutinized (everywhichway!) items. Here’s where Maud is in deep. She remembers childhood friends taking great pains with their flowers or trees or houses and then hastily filling in the rest. Never understood the sacrilege of that — positive dead without negative — the rich malty agar of context holds so much promise. So, relating intimately with orange and broccoli and grapes and coral and tablecloth are tiny scattered wallpaper rosebuds floating in thick sweet cream; a stellar array, each bud a jewel to be polished. Maud, scanning with her magnifying glass, follows the roadways of minute cracks, bubbles, other imperfections, up and down the wall, around door jambs and window frames, along floor and ceiling moldings. Maud: carried away again.

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Come back, Maud.

Anchor here, at the easel.

Inhale this elixir of paint and fruit and vegetable and flower and salt and time.

Put it all under your glass to inspect, inch by inch, for the secrets enfolded there.

Step back; walk around; hunker down; levitate; go outside and spy through the keyhole.

This is your still-life, Maud. Still, Maud. Maudie: your life.

You can see her now: Maud. Look — she took up the brush; is painting.

copyright 2011 Carol Rosenblum Perry

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