"Vanishing Point", by Ian C. Smith

He trawls his vast ocean of triumphs and failures; commissions, situations of renewed hope, love’s entanglements, his desire to paint truth.  Staring at his hands like a supplicant’s he counts conceptions.  Twenty-three descendants, he thinks, share his DNA.  The quiet surrounding him now seems accusing.  To recall as many as he can of his offspring’s strange names triggers mental alphabetical groping but memory, infuriating tease, abruptly pulls down her black blinds.  He even forgets the catalogue titles, necessities he cares little for, excepting those of several talismanic award winners.  When his morbid depression threatens to engulf him he mixes paint, the smell of this opulent melange a portal to the light of long ago, its brightness.

Bones aching, his back out of whack, he bears hurt from old tumult, some recollections squirm inducing, his antics once as bizarre as surrealism, a genre of influence.  Conversation limited because words occasionally desert mid-sentence, he uses a computer for emails and art info, hand hesitant on the mouse, and reads accrued newspapers.  The phone often needs charging despite being for emergencies.  A white-haired wraith, he locks doors on a binge of nudes, guns his old vehicle to town early to skim the supermarket aisles as soon as it opens, usually with the same loners.  He also collects mail, gases up, and, regularly, clutching a fistful of prescriptions, endures the chemist, where his epigrammatic humour falls flat, his mirror and blunt scissors home haircut obvious, cartoon-like.

A heavy art journal displays his name, but he didn’t write it, had to look up some prancing words, and he has known gallery success.  Abstinent at last, mantled by a grey cloak of loneliness, sipping Lapsang Souchong tea accompanied only by a wary ex-feral cat, he reasons his days of glorious colour draw to their vanishing point.  He hears birdsong and stillness, admires Chagall, and Vincent.  At night the beam from a lighthouse on a distant island comforts him like an old friend.  When beginning painterly projects he hates the mood until they spark, then, in love again, he elopes into them.  In dreams he carouses, young, seeking romantic sex, waking as hard as a teenager, but at first light in a tangled sweat, drained.

When his first wife left him and their children he relied on their recently appointed nanny, who, born in Europe, had lived an international life.  She flew by light aircraft with them to an island.  Eventually they settled in their special spot on it where she became his spouse and muse.  The beach, its bay, staithes in rocks, cray coffs, summer children collecting crabs, all became beloved subjects.  Still strong then, he built a shack that grew, knew she watched his rippling abs as he rowed them to another favourite nearby island, wind-whipped, straining through the swell, believing he was directing the show.

She knew people suspected her of what went wrong between him and his first wife.  His, and his now adult children’s reticence about the woman didn’t help.  When his strength waned, much younger than him, running the business side of his art, she strode ahead in fury on their walks around the bay, sick of waiting for him to catch up.  She believed success meant making the most of one’s lot.  Modelling was boring/difficult because she couldn’t remain still.  When he said he might have to paint her in the bath as Bonnard did so lovingly with his reclining wife she flinched.

Like her predecessor she, too, departed, marriage with a high I.Q. artist who had survived a loveless early life beyond salvage.  She was also over her rival, his rapture, the endlessly fussed work.  Gobsmacked, left with some cobwebbed unsatisfactory pictures he would resuscitate painstakingly glinting in a light-blessed room, bric-a-brac she had not wanted, and that rat catcher, listening to the Tasman Sea’s refrain, or reading the English poet, Robin Robertson, he imagines echoes from the leavings of the past.  These tableaux themselves could be paintings.  A sadness he knows from looking at old photographs steals over him.  He resents the withering disapproval of artistic freedom from those who might have shared his creative genes but didn’t, their slyness, flippancy regarding truth, wants to do it again, differently.