The Colorman

Erika Wood

The Colorman
Copyright © 2009 by Erika Wood

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any way without written permission from the publisher, except in cases of brief quotations in reviews.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009930600

Contact Chris Sulavik
Tatra Press LLC
292 Spook Rock Road
Suffern, NY 10901
www.tatrapress.com

Text composed by Heather Marshall.

Book design by Kathleen Lynch, Black Kat Design.

To Seth

and to Ronan and Freya

Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.

—C
LAUDE
M
ONET

Vibrating, colors peal like silver bells and clang like bronze bells
,
proclaiming happiness, passion and love, soul, blood
and death.

—E
MIL
N
OLDE

M
ost of the animals James Morrow had begun to collect since his illness were small and all of them were already dead. He didn't kill them, even though for his purposes, the carcasses were better fresh than days-old and bloated. He could always use the bone from a creature left long on the roadside. Though Morrow had lost his sense of smell by then, he did leave the skunks to the proper authorities. He kept thick, construction-site trashbags and rubber gloves in his car for drives along the country lanes near his manufactory. So it was that some raccoons, an unfortunate opossum and numerous squirrels donated their little bodies to his work.

Working in the evenings after his employees had left, he skinned the animals, separated fat from flesh, and subjected this portion or that to the tools of his trade. The bones he then dried and burned, some charred to matte black, others all the way to ash white. Still others he dried slowly in a kiln until light and powdery. Fat was cooked down, skin and sinew were tanned, muscle and certain organs were salted, dried and wrapped in thick, tar-soaked cloth strips. Cennini had recommended sheep's feet for bone black and whites, but Morrow believed he'd chosen that particular beast simply for its easy availability at the time, though it could have been for the thickness of the bone.

Considering this, Morrow rubbed his arm and squeezed it to the circumference of his wrist. He stared at his hands with curiosity.

At that time he had not yet met Rain Morton; in fact, he had forced the memory of her existence from his mind. Though the probability of his early demise had been explained by the main oncologist his HMO had assigned to him, and though it had prompted him to get on with this project he had vaguely been planning for decades, the doctor had failed to fully impress upon him any tragedy or finality to his diagnosis. In fact, all the various doctors and nurses James had contact with projected an interest in the cancer itself. But, having not met him before he appeared with his symptoms and damning bloodwork, the doctors had made little contact with James Morrow's well-protected soul.

Overlooking the deepest part of the Hudson, just south of its bend at Constitution Island, at the dead end of one dirt road into another, sat Highland Morrow Paint and Pigments Manufactory. The Highland Morrow factory was built early in the nineteenth century by practical men who would never have dreamed of depriving a building of charm or warmth just because its purpose was manufacturing. It was practical for the time, which is to say invitingly scaled to humans, with its redbrick facade, wrought iron gates, small courtyard and leaded windows. The views it commanded over the downward slope of trees, past the train tracks and the river beyond, toward the dramatic peaks of Crow's Nest and Storm King across the water, caused private homes, estates really, to be built right alongside it. Old Mahican Road had become tony and exclusive except for Morrow's modest little 1830s house adjacent to the factory. The other structures that had sprouted along this old dirt road were nothing if not immodest, dream homes designed and then built without compromises. Their money kept the area somewhat private, though every few years Morrow had to fight off some new resident's concern over the “dangerous chemicals” he used in manufacturing paints. Dangerous indeed. Thankfully, Morrow's grandfather had been forward thinking enough to ensure that his business had rights in perpetuity against all those who bought land around it.

Inside, brick pillars divided the factory's soaring casement windows and long metal and glass work tables held clusters of arcane-looking tools and bottled unctures. The work that took place on the main factory floor was hardly dangerous. Not to the neighbors, anyway. Under each window, mulling stations were manned in turns, fresh workers replacing those worn out by the literal grind. Workers were rarely neighbors, though Morrow often found that job-seekers came to him from art schools, the children of people like his neighbors. He tended not to hire them, however, preferring to hire men and women who were supporting families—folks who had no one else to pay their bills and who were more likely to stay with him long term.

Alvaro Montoya dumped a tall heap of red ochre-pigment powder onto the glass slab on the countertop and stabbed his large palette knife into the center, forming a neat crater. Into that he poured in a measure of first-press linseed oil. With the same palette knife, Alvaro scooped the raw pigment from the outer slope in—out in, out in, pressing down into the darkening center. He worked quickly so as not to lose any oil in rivulets off the side, collecting up what had quickly become a thick paste and pressing off to the center again. He scraped the excess from the palette knife onto the bottom of the crystal-clear muller and placed it down on the center of the lumpy bright red heap.

A muller is a thick, up-ended mushroom of solid glass weighing about ten pounds, the wider bottom flat up to a rounded edge, the upper part round and fat to Alvaro's hand. Alvaro moved the muller round, round, round, round over the glass surface to a count of twenty-four, causing the brilliant red to flatten out, a wide circle like a bright red vinyl record staining the glass. Then, tilting it up, sometimes having to break the suction with his palette knife, he skimmed around its edges and across the glass surface with practiced gestures, troweling the fresh paint into the center again. The grinding, Alvaro found, always released unique aromas depending on the pigment he was working with. Linseed oil had a sour nutty strong note that most people couldn't smell past, but Alvaro found that the unique qualities of each pigment began to assert themselves as his muller broke up and incorporated smaller and smaller particles of pigment into the oil. Red ochre, he found, gave a desert scent with a little metallic top note. A hint of something familiar, wet and sleek. And back into it he went: round, round, round, round to twenty-four again with his other hand on top.

Morrow had decorated the factory space with a series of large prints of famous paintings. Turner's “An Artist's Colourman's Workshop,” surprisingly tame, nonetheless reflected the work carried out at Highland Morrow. It was the other prints, including Degas' “Le Tub,” featuring a woman's back and long arm extended downward toward her feet, and Caillebotte's “Floor Scrapers,” showing the leaning, intensely physical pose of pulling scrapers along a wooden floor, which mirrored perfectly the physical nature of mulling paints. The muscular backs in Caillebotte's floor-scraper paintings, in his “Oarsmen,” and in various Degas bathers reminded the workers where these materials might end up, and the physical nature of what they gave toward that hope.

The yoga teacher James had engaged to train his staff in occupational and physical-therapy techniques encouraged Alvaro and the other employees to count grinds and switch hands and direction every twenty rounds or so. Alvaro counted to twenty-four since it was a nice musical number. Montoya was from Argentina, Spanish-speaking as most of his factory colleagues, though the others were from desperately poor circumstances in Mexico, Honduras and Colombia. Alvaro had been the beneficiary of a decent education and opportunities in his home country. He'd come to New York to be a musician, but found himself lumped together with the cleaning staff and delivery people by the privileged Americans he had met there. Morrow, on the other hand, though gruff and diffident most of the time, seemed to see Alvaro for who he was, more than just another pair of hands. Still, Alvaro's off-hours were spent at his piano, writing songs and composing tunes, so taking long periods of meditation to a four-four beat was the perfect job for him. One with private side-benefits.

After an hour of mulling, Alvaro took a turn on the machines. Most pigments were ground by hand, but Morrow had two triple-mill grinders for the more voluminous whites and the harder pigments.

The triple-mill grinder rolled its buttery paint, a green malachite this time, from drum to drum. Looking like icing in Oz, the mound of paint folded and bucked between rollers, turning and tucking in on itself like a living thing. The thin sheet it pulled down between the first two rollers was slid over and slurped up by a third roller, whose same direction of rotation pushed the gathering paint back upward where it grew into a silkier fat slug than what had been troweled in. Alvaro dug up the heavy stuff with a wide spatula and wiped it back up onto the first roller for another go through the mill. As the thick paste worked its way around the drums again, it was finally collected with a sensuous push push push into a wide-mouthed bucket below.

Highland Morrow specialized in artists' oil paints. Not just any oil paints, but handmade versions of a classical palette. Ultramarine, Olive Green, Yellow Ochre, Burnt and Raw Sienna and Umber, Venetian Red and Alizarin Crimson. Real Flake White and Lamp Black.

A list of colors at the art supply store. But those colors were cooked up, mixed, treated and tubed in very specific and sometimes quirky ways.

The term “Flake White,” for example, struck fear into the heart of many an artist, though its dangers were not always well-known or heeded. Van Gogh was said to have adored his lead white paint so much he ate it. This, of course, would have explained the intractable melancholy of his last days in Arles. Lead poisoning can cause blindness, deafness and kidney damage but, most uniquely of all, nerve disorders, muscle spasms and
irritability
(one of those charming medical euphemisms similar to discomfort as in “you may feel a pinch and then some discomfort during the extraction of spinal fluids”), all this leading, of course, to total loss of mental capacity and death.

Mercury, sulfur, lead and cadmium—materials making up many important pigments—are almost all deadly to humans in large enough doses. Artists have always been vulnerable to their effects by breathing their vapors hours upon hours in treacherously fragrant studios or frequently by absorbing them directly into the skin—on fingers used to smooth and correct, on the back of a hand used as a palette, into the palm while washing a paint brush and, of course, accidentally splattered, wiped on brows and spilled.