I turn on the cooker and warm up my Mulligan-type stew in an old pot. I pull my spoon from behind a supporting post where I store it and pour myself the one small glass of wine I allow myself each day. The six-franc bottle of wine I drink has to last a week. Aside from the costs of my painting materials, this wine, the butane, my baguettes, and the candles are the bulk of my expenditures.
I sit in the gathering dusk with the candles for light and slowly eat my portion of stew. I, who all my life have been a meat and potatoes man, have, perforce, become a vegetarian. At first I bemoaned the fact, but now, after several months, I sometimes think I couldn’t face a steak, or even a well-done hamburger. I feel a lot better, too. But that could be from the running.
I look at the painting. In this light, away from the subject matter, it looks better. I probably won’t paint in my sleep tonight. The whole idea of me painting oil paintings, considering everything, especially the cost, is an insanity; but I’m hooked. I don’t know how I’ll ever sell these things for enough money to pay back the cost of paint and canvas, let alone make a few francs. If I have to return to drawing and watercolor again, I’ll feel as if my legs have been chopped off. But I’ll do it, to keep my freedom.
I bought the paint box for a song. It’s a genuine collapsible easel made with hardwood, dovetail joints, brass fittings. This box has to be at least fifty years old, older than I am. It doesn’t have a metal inner liner as the new ones do, nor a second drawer underneath, but it’s sturdy and light. It’s constructed so the legs fold out and can be tightened to give strength. It’s all there, storage for paints, palette, brushes, turp, varnish, oil, paint cloths, and it opens to hold the canvas, any canvas, up to size 25F. Also, it’s smeared with paint and the air of authenticity. Just going out to paint with it gives me a thrill. I walk along feeling in tune with Monet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Sisley, a real painter in the field.
I thought carefully when I bought my paints. I found a place called HMB near here. It’s not an art store but a real paint store for the artisans around this area. The paints and brushes are about half the price I’d pay anywhere else. I decided on Le Franc Bourgeois paints, because they’re not too expensive, yet aren’t packed with filler or too much oil. I bought studio-sized tubes. I tried to stay with the cheapest colors, colors listed 1 or 2 on a scale of 6. I bought titanium white and ivory black. Those I remembered as my favorites from when I was back in school at Penn, with dreams of being a painter.
Then I bought earth colors. If necessary, I’d paint with them and black and white only. I bought burnt and raw sienna, burnt umber, yellow ocher. Next I bought a tube of ultramarine light. That was seven colors. To fill out my spectrum, at not too great a cost, I bought ultramarine violet, the cheapest violet; the other violets were 5s or 6s. Next, chrome yellow, chrome orange, both substitutes for cadmiums, which are 6s. Then alizarine crimson. For green I bought sap green. It’s transparent and can be used in the underpainting and also added to the yellows and earth colors for foliage. Last, I splurged and bought cerulean blue as a thirteenth color. Painting skies in Paris without cerulean would be a real challenge.
For brushes I bought pig’s bristles numbers 4, 8, and 10 and, luxury of luxuries, a number 6 sable. That last brush alone cost 42 francs, enough for me to live two weeks.
I make my own varnish from Damaar crystals I buy at HMB. It’s there I also buy huge cans of white acrylic house paint for sizing canvas, also turpentine and linseed oil by the half gallon. I usually have some crystals soaking in turpentine inside a woman’s nylon stocking up here in the attic. I try for a five-pound cut, but it’s mostly by guess and luck.
It’s the canvas that’s expensive. I shot half my whole wad buying a roll of raw duck canvas at a shop where they sell canvas drop cloths for painters. I snitch boards from up here in the attic to make stretchers. I tack canvas to them with carpet tacks and a hammer. I found the hammer, with a broken handle, in a trash can down the street. The short handle is enough for me, short-handled hammer and now a short-handled brush.
I use my fingers to stretch the canvas. I can get it tight enough that way. One trouble for me was figuring out when I should hammer the canvas onto the stretchers and heat the glue for sizing. Since weekends practically no one’s around, also the concierge leaves Sundays, I decide that will be the best day. The hammering makes noise and the glue stinks to high heaven.
I worked all last Sunday, that is, after I’d gathered my vegetables and some fruit when they closed the market at the Marché d’Aligre. They just throw away anything that’s started to rot. I cooked up my weekly stew at the same time I stretched canvas and made glue; all the smells blended together.
I built five stretchers, sized and put two layers of acrylic paint on the canvases after I’d stretched them. I pulled them nice and tight and have them stored in the rafters. I built them to the standard French dimensions. Two were 15 Figure and the last three were 25 Figure, or about two feet by three feet. It’s the first of those bigger ones I’m working on now, after getting frustrated with the 15s; they were too small. I’m getting to be a real big-shot painter; I’m just not making any money.
Even with all these cheapo solutions it’s going to break me soon unless I can figure some way to sell these damned paintings. I calculate, materials included, but not my time or labor, that I’ve got a hundred francs in each canvas when it’s finished. This means I need to recoup at least three hundred francs a painting. There aren’t many people walking around with that kind of money in their pockets, especially to spend on paintings by some nobody. However, the tourist season is coming soon. Probably I’ll sell something during the summer. I’ve got to!
I’m not complaining, though. Things have worked out so far and I’m feeling great. I know it’ll all come around okay. I have the feeling my life is beginning to make some sense again, despite everything.
The worst thing is loneliness. I try fighting it off, but it keeps sneaking up on me. I also try to keep myself clean. Once a week I go to the public baths next to the police station near the Marché d’Aligre. I scrub the worst dirt off my body and stomp on my clothes to get them clean. I wring out those clothes, put them in a plastic bag, and hang them in the attic to dry. I have a second set of clothes I wear out of the bath. But I still look pretty much like a bum. Maybe it’s the beard. I try scissoring it so it’s sort of neat, but if you’re wearing foot-stomped clothes, not ironed, and a beard, even if you’re clean, you can’t help looking like a clochard. It’s tough shaving every morning with no warm water. Razors would increase expenses, and besides, I’ve begun to like my beard. It takes the MBI curse off me, aims me in the right direction, the direction I want to go the rest of my life.
Once every month or so, I take my clothes to a self-service laundry. I shove them all in one washer, except for a sweat suit I wash by hand, then put them in the little spinner for a franc a shot. Together it costs seventeen francs, with drying. But after that I smell like an angel for a few days. My T-shirts glisten and my jeans almost have creases.
After I finish eating, I blow out my candles and stare for a while through the attic window. I keep thinking I’ll climb up and clean the grime off so I can see out to the sky, but I’m afraid of tipping off whoever really owns this place to the idea I’m up here, so I don’t. The weather’s getting good enough now so I can leave the window pushed up at night and have a good look at the stars when there are any. I’ve discovered from experience just how far I can push it up and still not have rain come in.
Before I fall into a deep sleep, I remember that tomorrow I should stop at American Express to see if there are any letters from Lorrie or the kids. Also, I want to write and let them know I’m all right and how well my painting is coming along.
Blind Reverie
His smell is so different from that of most men, not only the turpentine. And his voice, sometimes calm when he answers me, but there is excitement in there. At the same time, this is a sad man, an alone man. I think he is probably a good painter.
He