'Primitive' they called his work. What the fuck did that mean? He looked hard at his hands. They were a painter's palette. His whole left thumb was cadmium yellow. Spots of ochre and burnt umber in the right palm. A wad of napthol red light in the hairs on the back of the right forefinger.
Was any of his work worth doing? He stared hard at the canvas; but only at the backside of the canvas because he didn't dare to look at the painted region that he had turned toward the windows. Dirty windows. Soho soot all over them.
He had been fighting that God Damned painted surface for something like eight weeks. It laughed at him. It snarled at him. It interrupted his sleep. Above all else it just sat there dumb. No matter how bright the accents he daubed on it; how somber the shadows he dug in around them, he couldn't make it sing.
He liked the heron. Rising, frantic, wounded, majestic, just to the left of center. He fought the temptation to go around and examine it. He was in a murdering mood and would probably amputate the heron from the canvas before he could stop himself. The bird was good. But the green-brown mud and the tangled lianas were lousy. They didn't speak at all. Someone might say, 'Let them just be paint.' But he couldn't stand that. You had to want to climb up those vines into the branches of the mangrove, scaring off the cormorants.
The cormorants were dead. Sure, they were
supposed
to feel ominous and almost in danger of rattling down out of the branches like black hub caps; but no, they needed to be...more.
Yeah. He couldn't feel what they had to be. Just knew that the canvas demanded a certain face. You had to elbow all the ugly stuff out of the way. You had to throttle it, poke it in the eye, make it
tell
