A WOMAN PAINTER AND HER MODEL
Haiqing Wang
Lying on the edge of the bed, one leg of mine dangled toward the floor while the other folded comfortably, forming a 120°. Both my arms lay loosely beside my corpus, naked. It was cold, even though it was summer.
I gazed at Pan - she sat next to the bed, curled up on the carpet, an A3-size sketchbook resting in her lap. She moved the pencil held by her right hand, while her left hand was used to lift her glasses from time to time. She was naked, too.
It was the third evening that we did life drawing. Her eyes touched me slowly while the pencil simultaneously touched the paper. She said she couldn’t do two things at once, yet she did. Every second turned into a line on the paper; some seconds were thin, and some were thick. During these seconds, I thought she was able to draw me at the moment it happened, but I could only write it down when the moment had passed. Will it be precise enough? Will I ignore or forget some things? I am always late.
Like in most paintings of Marie Laurencin, she used pink, blue, and gray iconically. This one was named Femme peintre et son modèle (1921). I am able to write it live, with the photo of the painting and the Pages open simultaneously on my laptop screen, equally sharing half of the space as the two figures in the painting. On the left side, the model wears a pink hooded scarf that comes from her head, travels around her neck, and ends on her left shoulder. At first glance, I think she wears an elegant white dress, but soon I realize it is the same color as her skin, a pale white. No cuffs and nipples are recognized. Her eyes gaze tenderly at the painter while she gazes straight ahead. She could be looking into a mirror to paint or at me, here and now, gazing and writing in front of the luminous screen. Her skin is painted with the same tone of white, and her features are shaped the same way as the model as if they are indistinguishable from one another. She lifts the paintbrush with right hand toward her. Only now, I notice the edge of the canvas between them, suggesting that the model is being depicted on a canvas inside this painting.
We looked at each other. She was drawing my eyes. Was it me that she looked at, or was it just the shape of my eyes, eyelids, eyelashes, or eyeballs? There were so many things that she could look at that weren’t entirely me. I’m frightened that I have been disappearing. Goosebumps slowly emerged on my skin until I looked like a Flesh-colored cactus.
She stood up and came close to my neck with her warm breath. She read it aloud while writing it down letter by letter:
s-a-v-e-m-e-f-r-o-m-s-h-o-o-t-g-u-n-a-n-d-f-a-t-h-e-r-s-s-u-i-c-i-d-e
on my skin on the paper, but with perspective. It was my second tattoo, originally written on the napkin in a scene from the miniseries Oliver Kitteridge. I screenshotted it.
Then she moved down to my right lower arm, where another tattoo had been made on the same day. A string of numbers: (24.484677°N, 118.101069°E), in Times New Roman, Blod, 12, a latitude and longitude.
Where is it? People always asked.
The place you were born? Boring.
The place where you lost your virginity? Ew…
The place…
Where can a place be so important that it needs to leave a mark on your skin as if what’s so important needs to be written down? During the last big format analog photography workshop with Sophie, we learned how to load an 8x10 film in a completely dark room, how to set up the medium format camera, how to focus, and how to develop, fix, and dry a photo. And then, what to film? What subject is so important that it's worth the effort than just taking a picture with your phone? Or the other way round, anything can be so significant when you do it with all this effort. It’s the power to write, rather than the power not to write.
The place where I killed the first man. I replied.