The Last Artist

By J.A. Wainwright

Confronted by his own mortality and that of his paintings, artist Ben Sand reproduces several modern masterpieces on the walls of an isolated French cave so they will last for 20,000 years.

His efforts are mirrored by those of a Paleolithic girl, An, who, in her own cave, reveals through stroke and colour the physical violence and spiritual depths of her pre-historic environment.

An’s visions and techniques are directly described, while the essence of Sand’s endeavours is found in compelling stories that emerge from landscape and human presence within paintings by Bruegel, Goya, Monet, and others.

The result is enduring images of visual brilliance framed by lived experience that has its own place and longevity in time.

The LAST ARTIST

• Language: English
• Publisher: CUSTOM BOOK PUBLICATIONS
• Release date: Jun 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310536175

J.A. Wainwright

ABOUT THE AUTHORJ.A. Wainwright was born in Toronto, Canada. Since 1972 he has lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia where he is McCulloch Emeritus Professor in English at Dalhousie University. His areas of specialization were contemporary and Canadian literature and popular culture, including a class on Bob Dylan and literature of the 1960s.His first novel, A Deathful Ridge: a Novel of Everest, was shortlisted for the Boardman-Tasker Prize in Mountain Literature in 1997, and his biography of painter Robert Markle, Blazing Figures, was shortlisted for the ForeWord Magazine Literary Prize in the U.S. in 2010. He has given readings from his fiction and poetry collections in Canada, the U.S.A and Europe.Poetry Publications:Moving Outward, Toronto: New Press, 1970The Requiem Journals, Fredericton: Fiddlehead Books, 1976After the War, Oakville, Mosaic Press, 1981Flight of the Falcon: Scott’s Journey to the South Pole, Mosaic Press, 1987Landscape and Desire: Selected Poems, Mosaic Press, 1992Fiction Publications:A Deathful Ridge: a Novel of Everest, Mosaic Press, 1997A Far Time, Mosaic Press, 2001The Confluence, Mosaic Press, 2007Biographies:Charles Bruce: World Enough and Time, Formac Publishing, 1988Blazing Figures: A Life of Robert Markle, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010

Book preview

Confronted by his own mortality and that of his paintings, artist Ben Sand reproduces several modern masterpieces on the walls of an isolated French cave so they will last for 20,000 years.

His efforts are mirrored by those of a Paleolithic girl, An, who, in her own cave, reveals through stroke and colour the physical violence and spiritual depths of her pre-historic environment.

An’s visions and techniques are directly described, while the essence of Sand’s endeavours is found in compelling stories that emerge from landscape and human presence within paintings by Bruegel, Goya, Monet, and others.

The result is enduring images of visual brilliance framed by lived experience that has its own place and longevity in time.

The LAST ARTIST

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J.A. Wainwright was born in Toronto, Canada. Since 1972 he has lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia where he is McCulloch Emeritus Professor in English at Dalhousie University. His areas of specialization were contemporary and Canadian literature and popular culture, including a class on Bob Dylan and literature of the 1960s.

His first novel, A Deathful Ridge: a Novel of Everest, was shortlisted for the Boardman-Tasker Prize in Mountain Literature in 1997, and his biography of painter Robert Markle, Blazing Figures, was shortlisted for the ForeWord Magazine Literary Prize in the U.S. in 2010. He has given readings from his fiction and poetry collections in Canada, the U.S.A and Europe.

Poetry Publications:

Moving Outward, Toronto: New Press, 1970

The Requiem Journals, Fredericton: Fiddlehead Books, 1976

After the War, Oakville, Mosaic Press, 1981

Flight of the Falcon: Scott’s Journey to the South Pole, Mosaic Press, 1987

Landscape and Desire: Selected Poems, Mosaic Press, 1992

Fiction Publications:

A Deathful Ridge: a Novel of Everest, Mosaic Press, 1997

A Far Time, Mosaic Press, 2001

The Confluence, Mosaic Press, 2007

Biographies:

Charles Bruce: World Enough and Time, Formac Publishing, 1988

Blazing Figures: A Life of Robert Markle, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010

AUTHOR’S NOTE

My thanks go to The Art Gallery of Hamilton in Ontario, Canada; Paul Mason Productions; and the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri for permission to reproduce, respectively, Horse and Train by Alex Colville, Chestnut Prospector #150 by Bill Mason, and Tracer by Robert Rauschenberg.

The best book on cave painting for my purposes was Gregory Curtis’s The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World’s First Artists. Victoria Finlay’s Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox also provided valuable information.

My friendship and conversations about things creative with Peter Goddard, Marlene Markle, Larry Gaudet, Ken Sherman, Victor Li, Ehor Boyanowsky, Chris Arthur and John Justice helped significantly in the writing of this novel.

As always, the intellectual and emotional support of my partner Marjorie Stone reminded me of the larger canvas.

THE IMAGES

Chapter 1 – Return of the Hunters. Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

1565, oil on wood. Public Domain.

Chapter 2 – Chestnut Prospector #150. Bill Mason. 1975, oil on paper

Reproduced by permission of Paul Mason Productions.

Chapter 3 – The Third of May 1808. Francisco Goya.

1814, oil on  canvas. Public Domain.

Chapter 4 – Chestnut Prospector #150. Paul Mason Productions.

Chapter 5 – Bathers at La Grenouillère. Claude Monet.

1869, oil on canvas. Public Domain.

Chapter 6 – Reindeer. Font-de Gaume Cave, France. Public Domain.

Chapter 7 – The Stone Breakers. Gustave Courbet.

1850, oil on canvas. Public Domain.

Chapter 8 – Mammoth. Lascaux Cave, France. Public Domain.

Chapter 9 – Horse and Train. Alex Colville. 1954, glazed oil on hardboard.

Reproduced by permission of The Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario. Gift of Dominion Foundries & Steel Limited (Dofasco 1957). Copyright A. C. Fine Art Inc.

Chapter 10 – Chestnut Prospector #150. Permission of Paul Mason Productions.

Chapter 11 – Tracer. Robert Rauschenberg. Reproduced by permission of Nelson- Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City.

Standing Parvati Figure. Public Domain

Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Chapter 12 – Bison. Altamira Cave, Spain. Public Domain.

Chapter 13 – Chestnut Prospector #150. Permission of Paul Mason Productions.

Copyright © 2016 John Andrew Wainwright

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The

LAST ARTIST

J. A. Wainwright

… I laud your longing for eternity with limits.’

Lorca

for Mike Klug and Harry Whittier

PROLOGUE First Light

For a month each summer he and Katherine lived with Annie by the lake in Algonquin Park. The rest of the year they had their city place and shared an office in a design and typography firm run by one of the country’s top artists, an abstract expressionist and colour-field painter who had gained international recognition. For work they did on the side there was a business card ‒ Ben and Katherine Sand, Creative Design ‒ though she was really the one who ran things and brought in most of the extra money, as he spent most of his spare time painting. They had met in art school, where their shared enjoyment of books, films, and music softened any collision between his self-imposed creative demands and her more relaxed approach to her own career.

‘What’s your favourite film?’ he asked on their first date.

‘Jules et Jim. But I won’t drive off a bridge for you,’ she added quickly. ‘And yours?’

‘I should say Lust for Life, but it’s actually Blow-Up. Those photographs David Hemmings takes are impressionist wonders.’

‘Did you notice his character has trouble finishing anything he starts?’

He thought of all the preliminary pieces he threw out for each one he completed. ‘Yeah, but in the end he does see the invisible tennis ball and toss it back into the court.’

‘What’s that all about anyway?’

He gave it a moment. ‘Everything we can imagine is real, I guess.’

‘Nice.’

‘Not me… Picasso.’

Their courtship had been sweet but brief before they settled into a two-bedroom apartment close to downtown where they hung Cézanne and Group of Seven posters and kept their books in separate orange crates by the side of the bed. Neither of them had any siblings, and like most of their generation were on the run from their parents, so it was all a bit of an adventure at first in terms of emotional commitment. But their natural affection for one another closed any distances, and as time passed they were comfortable companions as well as lovers.

Soon after graduation they married and replaced the orange crates with a shared board bookcase in the living-room. The posters stayed, but they purchased some prints and even a priced-down lithograph from their boss. Their combined income at the firm and from their own design efforts allowed them to buy an isolated cabin in a national park from a friend who was moving to the west coast. It was ‘off a dirt road that was off a dirt road,’ as Ben liked to say, and they revelled in the freedom and isolation. The two Julys there before Katherine became pregnant, were a carefree time of swimming, hiking, and relaxed work ‒ for him taking an easel along the shore to a confluence of water, sky, and pines that he could pretend Tom Thomson had not seen; for her setting up a drawing board on the screened-in porch and conjuring new living spaces for urban dwellers.

Ben was worried at first about becoming a father. Of course he would provide a safe and stable place to live, saying and doing all the right things to assure their child grew up with self-confidence and well-informed about the world. But he wasn’t entirely sure about deeper obligations, given his life was already subdivided in several different ways that kept him from picking up a brush as often as he wanted to. Then, when he held Annie outside the delivery room, watching her watching him so carefully, his heart turned over and he knew she would take him beyond the usual frames.

They headed for the cabin just a few weeks after her birth, but their usual pattern was interrupted by one of them having to be in constant attendance. Even when she was sleeping, Katherine, who had been up in the night to breast-feed her, wouldn’t go farther than the porch where she only fiddled with designs. Although he still went off on his own to paint, Ben felt guilty about spending too much time alone. There were tiny strains in their relationship as a result, but these appeared to be products of their own failures to adapt rather than any dissatisfaction with one another or with Annie’s instinctive demands. They loved her dearly, and although she was unspoiled in material terms, they did lavish her with all the attention their combined sensibilities and knowledge could provide.

At a very early age, once she could walk and get around a bit by herself, Ben noticed her heightened response to the landscape and wildlife waiting for her in the summer.

‘Look, daddy,’ the three-year-old cried one morning, pointing at a blue jay balanced on a quivering pine branch. ‘He can’t fall into the wind.’ Another time she told him the paint spots on his hands were ‘colour-freckles.’

Katherine laughed, and said, with just the slightest edge to her voice, ‘Be careful, I think you’ve got a partner in crime.’

One sunny morning when she had just turned four he had given Annie a new pack of crayons and left her with her colouring book at the table before the big window overlooking the lake. Katherine was in the village shopping, and he had wood to chop. Behind the cabin he split logs for twenty minutes or so, wiping the sweat from his eyes with a torn sleeve and listening to a couple of jays squabble raucously over territory. Once he had cooled down, he would take his easel along an old path that petered out on a rocky spit of land half-covered in water after every storm. Looking north, he would sketch the reflection of cloud and sky rippled only by the wake of passing loons. Annie would stay close and look for tadpoles in shallow pools. He piled the wood carefully, gathered up a few pieces for the fire, and went back inside. The colouring book lay unopened on the table, the crayons scattered, and Annie was gone.

The wood clattered to the floor as he looked around wildly then stepped quickly to the door and yelled her name. Nothing, not even an echo. Leaping down the hand-cut steps in the bank to their small beach beside the dock, he sought out tell-tale footprints in the sand, but knew in an instant she had not come this way. The road to the village was behind the cabin where he would have seen her, and the forest all around was impenetrable for a little girl, so that left only the old path to the point. He raced along it, well aware of the previous night’s rain and the way the lake water snaked over the land in unpredictable patterns. ‘Annie!’ he shouted in hope and despair.

She was so small he could easily have missed her crouched behind a large rock, her eyes fixed on its surface, the crayon busy in her hand. But her mother had dressed her in bright blue before she left, brighter than the lake itself glinting so placidly in the morning light. ‘Annie,’ he called softly now, not wanting to frighten her as he approached, but her concentration was unbroken. When he reached out to ruffle her hair his fingers never reached her curls as out of the corner of his eye he spied the scrawl of red lines across the lichen-speckled face of the rock.

The crayon was almost down to its stub and still she drew intently though he could not make out any design. It looked like a Léger being born, without as yet any stick figures or recognizable shapes emerging, and he stood watching her with a paternal pride and satisfaction. The little artist at work. What a story to tell Katherine and their friends. He wished he could take the rock back to the cabin and hang it on a wall because he knew the marks would disappear with the first rain. The camera! he thought. At least then they’d have a copy. Before he could move, she made a squiggly mark in the bottom right-hand corner, her imitation signature in stone. Only then did she look up and hand him the stub. ‘Painting, daddy’ she said, the lilt in her voice suggesting a question not an answer.

*****

ONE Return of the Hunters

There was Bruegel the Elder and his son, the Younger, both accomplished painters. In the end the father became more famous even though he died at forty-four. Sand looked up his personal history, realizing that at the Elder’s birth in 1525 Michelangelo had been at his peak and only a few years before Luther had nailed his writ to the Wittenberg church door. What an era, filled with cultural as well as military explosions that blurred the lines of many state borders. This painting, at once familiar and foreboding, was a portrait of the purely local and domestic, yet it had stayed the course with the famed outpourings of the Florentine on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and, in today’s almost entirely secular age, had a good chance of outlasting the Protestant church.

They were heading downhill toward the skaters when I heard one of them, Frankie I think, say, ‘Let’s have a drink first.’

I was standing just inside the doorway of our inn, looking up at the crooked sign hanging loosely and twisting in the wind, which I wanted my husband to fix. I had been after him for months but he said it was hardly important, everyone knew we were the Inn of the Stag and cared little about appearances.

‘What about the other problem?’ I asked him. The sign had faded over the years and you were unable to make out the lettering or the figure of the animal any more. If people were thirsty, he said, or wanted a bed, they would find their way and drink under a smudged boar or a chicken for that matter. Anyway, I saw Frankje and the two others turn toward us, followed by their dogs. I was not having that pack inside, pissing everywhere and getting into mischief. But there wasn’t a problem since they stopped outside by the fire where the girls were singeing the pig and started sniffing around the edge of the pit.

‘Any luck?’ I asked as the hunters came in the door. I could see Frankje had a fox hanging from a rope down his back and the others carried no game at all. But as an innkeeper you had to show some interest, didn’t you?

‘Naw,’ Frankje said, pulling off his fur mittens. ‘Too cold out there. ‘This one’ ‒ he swung the fox from his back and dropped it on the floor ‒ must have needed a shit.’ They all laughed, and I smiled in return because I was supposed to. ‘Bring some mulled wine, then, to put a fire in us,’ he said.

It was a feast-day and that, along with the cold, was why they came back when they did. I saw them leave a few days before, heading out for the hut in the woods beyond the fields. It was snug enough out there with a proper fireplace and chimney. They set and baited their traps and often returned with a dozen pelts or more. This time, despite their poor luck, they wouldn’t miss the feast.

‘You think that’ll feed us all?’ Paulus asked, nodding toward the roaring fire outside where the pigskin crackled and gave off a fine smell. He was the shortest of the three, and his leather jerkin almost covered his knees.

‘There’s another inn down at the river if you want to go there,’ I replied, meaning the The Swaying Oak, ‘but we’ve got lots of bread and vegetables from the cellar and plenty of what you’ll need.’ I was talking about his mainly liquid diet of beer and more beer.

‘When are you going to get that sign fixed, Henny?’ Frankje asked after a long draught of the wine I brought them in steaming cups.

‘You ask Remy,’ I said. ‘He’s in charge. Or so he says.’

They laughed at my jibe, but it was understood the man about the house did the repairs. You wouldn’t see me up on a ladder with my stockings showing.

I went to the door and looked down the hill. Far below the skaters were dancing over the two ponds formed by the frozen river. The snow-covered land stretched away beyond them toward the mountains on one side and the sea on the other. There were a few birds in the trees but only one in flight and it looked like it was in a hurry to reach a warm nest. Immediately below I could see an older woman hunched over against the wind, slide-stepping across the ice, and above her on the bridge a man carrying a load of straw across his shoulders. ‘That’s near done,’ I shouted at the girls about the pig. They must have been cold out there and ready for their own nip of wine. Meanwhile I pushed the door shut against the winter and went back to my customers. ‘Give us a hand with the pig, boys,’ I said, ‘and there’s another cup for each of you.’

‘We won’t turn that offer down,’ Frankje replied.

They went outside where I could hear them bantering with the girls. Through the window I watched them stick the pig with their pikes and lift it waist-high. Normally we would have left it outside and people would just help themselves by the fire. But the cold was bone-chilling today so inside it would have to be. They brought it in and set it on the table in the main room, the pork smell filling every nook and cranny of the house.

‘Mmm,’ Paulus said and sliced a piece off from the flank.

‘Get away, you,’ I yelled, smacking his hand. ‘When you pay for your drink tonight you’ll get some meat and bread. Those are the rules, as you well know.’

‘Sorry, missus.’ The grease slid down his chin and dripped on his jerkin. The spot was soon smeared when he wiped his hands on his chest.

The third one, the boy, had not yet said a word, just sipped his wine so slowly I knew he wouldn’t need another cup. A boy I call him, but Piet was almost twenty years old and Frankje’s nephew, the son of a sister who had lived down on a bridge-house until she died of a fever when he was still a baby. His father was gone too, from an infected cut when Piet was twelve or thirteen. Raised by his older sister in the bridge-house, he was not much to look at, thin and pasty-skinned, but his eyes were bright and when he did speak up he could make us laugh with the way he looked at what was around him, always seeing something in the ordinary that most of us missed in our busyness.

Just then my husband came in from the shed where he had been stacking barrels of beer and wine. He and Frankje began teasing Paulus about his sloppy manners, my husband telling him he had an extra jerkin he could use for wiping his arse as well. I turned away and began polishing some candlesticks, though not because I’d not heard such language before. You hear everything in the drinking room of an inn. But a woman who joined such conversation was assumed to be of a certain character, and I was not about to allow myself in that company. When I looked up I could see brightness in Piet’s eyes and a half-smile on his lips that seemed to say ‘I’m with you’ and ‘I see through you’ at the same time. I cleared my throat and polished harder.

The feast got properly underway in the afternoon and by nightfall was in full swing. We had pushed the table with the pig back against one wall along with the benches. Various men were staggering about trying to keep their drink in their cups, while couples were dancing in the middle of the room. The pig meat was coming off in great slices and the girls kept bringing in fresh-baked loaves from the kitchen. Frankje and Paulus had not gone home at all, just waited for their wives to come up the hill, which they did eventually. I liked neither of them much, hard women they were, but I supposed they’d been made that way through the years when their men were off so much and they were alone with too many children and chores. Piet had left before the festivities really began in earnest, but I saw him return around dusk and sit in a corner where he could look out at the crowd and not be surrounded by bodies or overwhelmed by words. I swear he held the same cup I had given him earlier in the day, sipping from it slowly as if it were spring-fed with wine.

A group of men had gathered at the plank trestle where I was serving drinks. Why bother to wander off when you were just going to return for more? They were talking loudly about the usual things ‒ the weather, the crops, the absence of small game at this time of year. We carefully stored away our vegetables and grain at harvest-time, but even so the winters were often hard. That was why the slaughter of a pig was special and a feast-night good not only for the body but the soul. Somehow the subject came around to the matter of our sign.

‘It’s not just a matter of hanging it up properly,’ one said. ‘What’s the point of that if you can’t even make out the lettering or the stag?’

‘Who cares?’ another pronounced, seeming to support my husband’s point of view. ‘We all know this place, and any stranger coming along can just ask where the inn is. Hell, you just have to follow your nose.’

‘Your red nose,’ another chimed in, and they all laughed boisterously.

‘No, no,’ said the first. ‘Every village is distinguished by its signs, beginning with those that mark it from miles away. How would you like it if we didn’t have a sign at the crossroads north and south of us, and travellers had to rely on a farmer or, God forbid, a hunter?’ He looked mischievously at Frankje and Paulus who were leaning against one end of the plank.

‘Better us than a cooper who never leaves the village in the first place,’ Frankje shouted at the defender of signs.

‘What I make holds the spirits that take you on your nightly journeys,’ the barrel-maker replied. ‘And how would you like to be faced with a roomful of barrels that didn’t spell out their contents. Very frustrating that would be for a man wanting to fill his cup.’

‘Alright, alright,’ the red-faced Frankje said, but you can’t very well call it the Inn of the Crooked Sign, can you?’ He turned to me. ‘Well, Henny, when are you and your man going to tell the rest of us exactly where we are?’

Just then my husband brushed by behind the trestle carrying a small barrel under his arm. ‘I know what’s in here alright,’ he said, patting the worn staves with his free hand. ‘And I’ve seen enough of you lot to know that after the third cup you don’t give a damn where you are anymore or even who you are.’

‘I made that barrel,’ the cooper said. ‘See that small mark on the bottom that looks like a half-circle? That’s my mark. Every man has one if he has to use it. Every woman, too,’ he said, nodding at me. I could see he was serious about this and determined to convince us. ‘I propose a contest,’ he called out loudly to include the dancers and those on the benches. ‘Here’s one florin from me. Reach in your purses and we’ll soon have a prize for the best new sign that will go up on the Inn of the Stag.’ He turned to my husband. ‘That’s the name you wish to keep?’

‘You can have your damn contest! I’ll agree the sign can go up but only if someone else does the job.’

The crowd cheered. I put a wooden bowl on the plank and it was soon filled with coins. I threw in my own and my husband looked at me darkly. He might take a new sign but he would not pay for it.

‘Two weeks from today,’ the cooper declared. ‘We’ll all meet here and decide on the winner.’

There’s not much going on in the village in the depth of winter. Whatever the cold, as long as the wind isn’t blowing too strongly, people will be on the river after Sunday church, double-edged blades tied with leather straps to the bottom of their boots, the steam of their breath turning to ice crystals on their cheeks and chins as they glide along. Feast days are not every day so, except for the hunters and regular tavern-haunters, men and women stay by their own hearths for the most part, mending harness, sharpening tools for the spring ground-breaking, and making tallow from beef or pig’s meat for soap, candles, or cooking fat. Children sit by the fire playing card games or Fox and Geese with their red and black pieces on the cross-shaped board, wishing all the while for warm weather.

The sign contest brought us some excitement, especially since the coins in the wooden bowl had added up to twenty florins in the end. It seemed everyone had an idea for a winning sign, though of course not all of them would actually try to make one.

Ours was a business, my husband made clear. Now that he was ready to admit a new sign might be in order, he was not prepared to accept anything paltry in nature. Only the best would do, and he certainly planned to have a chief say in who would take away the prize. Meanwhile, Frankje, Paulus, and Piet went out to their hut again, prepared to stay for some time. ‘We’ll try to get back for the sign-judging,’ Frankje told me, ‘but you might have to go ahead without us. Just make sure the stag has a great rack of horns. Wouldn’t be a proper stag without them.’

A few days later, I saw Piet walking down the hill toward his parents’ house. There were no dead animals slung over his back, and he seemed so lost in himself that I didn’t call out to ask why he had returned. He was moving through the snow comfortably enough, so I didn’t think he was ill. At the market stall next morning where an old woman sold potatoes to those who had run out or, like me, needed them to feed more than just family, his sister told me he was painting a sign. She had not seen it, she said, but she could smell the oil and, although he cleaned his hands before sitting down for supper, his smock was covered in colours that would never wash off. She also told me the village carpenter was carving a stag in fine-grained wood and several other craftsmen were working on fancy lettering and pretty pictures. I was not astonished by such efforts, but I must say Piet’s involvement caught me by surprise. I hadn’t thought that brightness in his eyes was for sale.

When Piet was not hunting with Frankje and the others he painted shutters and doors, touched up the letters above the apothecary’s window, and brushed a dark sheen of oil into the church pews, all for a bit of money. But as far as painting his own sign was concerned, well, that was new. There were more than a few men in the village whose craft skills outshone his, and those like the carpenter could handle a chisel with the delicacy of a brush. I always thought there was something special about Piet, though not that he was a craftsman of any kind. His particular knack was in the way he saw the world the rest of us took for granted. My granny used to say