Three Dont Tango 27

Ann has found some glass and has decided to paint it. She had been looking at some pictures by Roualt; all richly painted like old stained glass windows. Now she's decided to do her own stained glass. She mixes up a thick pug of paint and slops it onto the glass, whirls it round, messes about with it, changes it, covers another sheet of glass, frowns, throws water on the first, and then scrapes off the paint. Then she drags a piece of paper across the glass. Her eyes light up. She gets another piece of paper, draws it a little way across the glass, then twists it a little, pulls it a bit further, twists it again, then peels it off. She has just found a new toy.
She scrapes the second pane of glass, wets it a little, and starts pulling and twisting another piece of paper across the surface.
Soon the room is covered with small pieces of sodden paper showing a crazy highland fling of colour. Some of the resultant pictures look like ice caves, others like drunken sunsets. There are mountain ranges, and a whole series which look like volcanoes bursting forth with much lava. In fact the series looks like a representation of the creation of the world.
She comes down all wide-eyed and excited. She has discovered a new genre.
I was anything but wide-eyed and excited. I had discovered a big hole in my outlook on life. How is it that I have set out on a path that I am not very good at, and that I also positively hate?
There is, of course, a very simple answer to that question. I need the money.
"Come and have a look," Annabel enthused, hopping about and holding her arms out in a funny way she had.
I followed her upstairs.
"I'd like to print these in a book."
I frowned. "Expensive."
She turned up her nose and squeezed her lips together. "Anything that's nice and worth doing is too expensive."
"I'd like to do some poems to them. Perhaps we could publish a book with the poems and the paintings."
"It would still be too expensive."
I knew it would be too expensive, but I sat and stared at the pictures. I still wanted to do a series of poems to go with them. Their primordial violence of form and colour, their creational chaos appealed to me. I wanted to form words to go with this flux.
"It's obviously the creation of the world."
"Can you write something to go with them?"
I could and I would.
'Creation' seemed to be a good working title to cover the work in progress. I spent a couple of days thinking about the project. I looked at the pictures, pushed them into groups, then re-grouped them, thinking about how they could hang together. The more I looked at them the more several ideas came to mind. It seemed to me that Ann had stumbled upon a rather interesting genre of painting. It was an amalgam of stained glass painting, Turner water colours, and Jackson Pollock action painting. Maybe the Jackson Pollock approach to painting wasn't a dead end after all. Had Annabel just discovered a way to develop that particular style into something new and vibrant?
I wrote short descriptions to mirror the pictures. They were mood pieces. Ann's pictures were really landscapes, but abstract landscapes. This picture could be a picture of mountains, but it wasn't, it consisted of colours and shapes that prompted one to think of mountains. The next picture was simply a hot cauldron that reminded me of the central vortex of a volcano about to erupt. Another was an ice-cold landscape. That was the interesting thing about the paintings. They weren't pictures of places, they were pictures of feelings, pictures of concepts.
Sitting at my desk writing, looking at the pictures, reading background material, listening to music, I felt warm and comfortable. I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. I was using language to create something. I felt at home in my world again. Sod the building. Sod the rest of it. This is the real me. This is my life.
I stared across the room. If only I could do this and earn money instead of having to do all that other shit.

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