“Sit still,” you say. She readjusts her hands and a smile itches at you.
You resume scratching at the easel. She glares towards the right again, jaw set and back straight. It reminds you a bit of how the British officials sat for their portraits — robes draped over padded shoulders, a sword by their side.
“I’ll look away from you in the painting, just like I’ll ask you to do when I paint you,” she emphasizes. “Directing your gaze away from the onlooker adds atmosphere to the piece, and it draws attention to the background.”
You decided against telling her that there won’t be much of a background to begin with. And anyway, you’re not sure you’d dare to keep painting if she looks at you like that. Someone might find it a sweet irony; the local Realist who smears black and red all over the canvas, who paints poems rebutting the mata-mata, who makes the faces of laborers look like cracked valleys, who’s now hesitant in front of your friend’s sister.
Her arms lean out from her cheongsam like a rickshaw puller’s, and her hair is plaited in military-grade rows. You note the soft end that completes it, the small spiral that curls against her collar.
You put down the pencil. “I’ll start on the paint now, so you can take a short break if you want.” She shakes her head and you duck behind the easel to hide a smile. It’s this attitude that moves the nation now. No, I don’t need that many rest days. Yes, I can work overtime. A blob of green swirls into yellow like a hallucination, like a luxury we can only dream of affording.
But you dream anyway, both of you do.
As you begin on the base layer, you look up and smile. “What?” She asks.
“Nothing,” you reply. “It’s just the light. I chose this time because I wanted to try painting when the light hits from this direction.”
What you don’t say is how it slides off her cheekbones like gold. How it slips down her nose, translates her schoolgirl features into Roman marble. How you walked into her brother’s house one evening and saw her sitting under the window in the breaking dusk, and after she walked over at an amused brother’s request and told you her name, the light scribbling dark under her eyes, you realised you had to paint her to understand something you could not explain.
“It’s an interesting angle,” you say.
What does it mean to make art in a nation reeling from its birth, where paintings are still luxuries no one can afford? You believe that it is to say something that cannot be articulated, to search for the tiger sleeping in the market and throw a match at it. Your brush curls into the curve of her neck. But that’s in the context of paintings of laborers and adults in language classes, you think.
What does it mean here, when it’s a portrait of one girl?
It is only when you must consider how to colour the shine of her cheek that you understand. To paint someone is to say something, is a confession from the canvas to the artist which only the observer understands. As you fill in her pupils, you decide on your message.
Many years later, after the boisterous exhilaration of the tea ceremony, her brother will turn to you grinning and ask, did you fall for her because you painted her, or did you paint her because you fell for her? It’ll be a question you ponder for years, all the way till the museum calls her “the artist’s late wife” and you realise it doesn’t matter.
For now, you colour in the yellow of her skin and the divinity of her stare. Yes, you think. Yes. The necessity of this luxurious dream — someone, in a future time, will remember us. And it will matter.
She glances at you from the corner of her eye and smiles.
Elena Goh is a writer and postgraduate student based in Singapore. She is currently a publishing intern at Ethos Books, and pursuing a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge. Her short fiction and poetry have been featured in Strange Horizons, Twin Flame Literary, Mosaic Art & Literary Journal, Sekudu Quarterly, and The Writer’s Block. She has also written film reviews for the Singapore Film Society and the UCL Film & TV Society Journal. Her work explores the intersections of intergenerational memory, cultural identity, and Classical mythology.
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