voyageur

From the Scrap Book

The only time in my life that I had come close to being bohemian was the last summer of my visual art degree. And while my middle-class humanist parents-funded education certainly disqualified me from all the true artists around me, the ones whose art had become a mean of rebellion against the suffering of the poor, I nevertheless spent the days of that summer trapped in a tiny studio on the top floor of a thirties modernist building among unfinished canvasses and my nights in the concrete courtyard of the art department drinking wine and smoking and arguing for the liberation of the line from the regiment of centuries of Western realism.

The studio was at the end of a long, dimly-lit hallway, the grey concrete walls covered with paintings of varying style and degree of artistic merit, but all covered by a layer of dust and nicotine and paint thinner wafting from underneath the doors to the studios. All studios on this floor were of a similar layout: brightly lit under a slanted roof with large single-glass pane windows. In the winter, water would drip from the ceiling onto freshly coated canvasses turning colours into watery blotches of unidentifiable grey that resembled bad imitations of a Turner painting. The small electric heaters that were brought in would dispense their scarce heat achingly. Small driblets of water would fall onto the heating spirals and evaporate with a loud hiss. In the summer, the wooden beams that held up the roof would crackle in the heat. The air would be heavy with paint fumes and clouds of cigarette smoke and human sweat and the smell of unwashed overalls. The heat dried up large chunks of paint on the paintbrushes before anyone could smear them across the canvasses. When it stuck to the work in progress, prickly pieces of artificial hair would rip out of the hardened ends of unwashed paintbrushes and would stand upright from the glossily-coated surfaces like hair on the skin of a pig. The small space was cramped: in one corner gathered seven work tables overflowing with dried-up tins, broken crayons and scattered rugs, in another a large stack of forgotten canvasses of generations of students who would inhabit this room for a few years before moving on to teach art at the local high school or the community college. Several canvasses had been recoated and repainted and forgotten. A large wooden crate held a collection of bones, broken bottles, scraps of metal and various unidentifiable items that were picked up, assembled into various compositions, painted, abandoned and eventually found their way back into the box. In the middle of the distinct chaos stood a blue folding chair that allowed the aspiring artist after too much work or too much wine to pass out and sleep off their intoxication only to wake up in the grey of the morning with the velvety aftertaste of cheap wine and acetone covering their palate.