Arrow by Arlene Tribbia

Photo Source: Unsplash

In the life drawing class Matisse hovers just beyond the edges of our easels and if I squint and look hard enough, his thoughts appear like small mirages in the air before fluttering and floating off. It made me wish I knew French – but I decipher a lot from his moods and get the rest from the others in class.

He’ll tell anyone who asks that he doesn’t like teaching.

But there he is, every Wednesday night sweating there along with us, wiping his brow like he’s arrived here from some sunny garden in Nice and just stopping in to impart his knowledge to us about drawing the figure because he knows his way around its most intimate contours. I often wonder if he got lost and wandered in from a dream. But nope, there he is talking in a way that makes strange, if contradictory sense.

We must think of the body as a tree or as a cathedral when we draw. The body is a system of knots and connected branches of wonders and all we need to do is reveal the grace. Don’t let it make you dizzy.

It’s not natural for me to imagine hands as leaves, wrists and arms as branches and even so, where do the roots go? Plus, it’s difficult to draw the stained glass windows of her eyes and what about the bronze cathedral bells dangling from her ears.

When you begin your drawing remember that you’re searching for the significant gesture, the whole, let’s say a gesture of hope. Before we commit to draw, we look. What do you see? Every mark must be honest. Draw the correspondences you feel and sense, follow the lines of the crowds coming and passing through the cathedral doors of any life – all of the people we will ever meet as they become part of a person’s natural history – and don’t ever believe you’ll know everything before you begin. You can’t possibly understand how leaves pray long into the night or even how the smallest seeds love a good revelation. Imagine what it might be like to meet an angel.  

He says all of it, the body, the tree, the cathedral point upwards to bluer than blue, say some otherworldly vision beyond the stars, a mystery to all artists everywhere. To everyone, really.

The body is the only way the spirit can be seen. Why else do you think we desire to draw it?

We draw the figure over and over again, so much that there’s almost always a soft breeze from so many pencils and charcoal sticks and erasers working the air in the room. One night after class as we’re filing from the classroom, almost as an afterthought, he calls out after us, Morality is the color blue. It’s harder than charcoal or graphite, you know.

Week after week, my portfolio fills with abandoned cathedrals and trees class after class.

Sometimes in my dreams I’m trying to assemble a thousand and one poses into one beautiful continuous line, one resembling the beauty of her spirit, one illuminating the complexity of her thoughts, the whirlwind colors of all her future selves, her desperate desires and the transcendent explanations she has for her shifting moods and truths.

I discover that of all the thousands of possible lines to choose from, only one is ever drawn and it’s never the right one or completed.

It’s hopeless. Not holy. 

Draw what you want. It’s as simple as that. Forget angels. Forget about seeing the spaces around and between things. Forget you’re here. Become the line. What you want to do is engage the arrangement of what’s beyond. The soul is an arrow.

Beyond what? The person you’re drawing, the room you’re standing in, this life of yours where you’re spending precious hours lost holding a stick of charcoal to the paper remnant of a tree transmuted from some other dream?

And for what?  It seems like in this art studio the angels smoke cigarettes, rearrange lines, the events and circumstances of our lives and snicker.

But then one morning when I open my portfolio to peer inside, there among the smudged drawings, charcoal erasings and the fingerprints from so many drawn out hours left behind in the classroom, I discover the lost scent of candle wax, incense and deeper within, sunlight and air and wind gathering around the cherry and pear trees from my childhood and past the front lawn, there along the horizon where two lines tremble and meet, an immense flock of sparrows takes off from a stand of maples, leaving behind green swaying and just beyond that, I hear cathedral bells ringing, all of it lingering within a blue that’s as incandescent as my first kiss, somehow true, somehow a perfume, somehow an arrow pointing the way from one dream into another.

Arlene Tribbia is a poet and artist who grew up in Chicago.Stories of hers have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

She often writes poetry and fiction about otherworldly beings because she’s fond of creating characters who work to solve the larger cosmic riddles of the universe.

A story along with a podcast interview is featured on the Onyx Story Discovery podcast.

If you would like to learn more about Arlene, you can find her website here.