doesn’t mind what? It was another world down here. I had no idea how they lived. I decided to jump to no conclusions about any of it.
The next day Jack took me down to his studio. I remember it vividly. All his work was there and much else besides, all the junk he’d accumulated, plus the work of local painters and others passing through who’d heard of Jack Rathbone’s studio in Port Mungo and come to visit. It was a vast, cavernous space with wooden walls and lofty rafters, and huge doors giving onto the dock through which flooded light reflected off the river, with a wooden scaffold on wheels for getting at the high parts of large canvases. Amid the quantities of stuff in there I remember the jaws of a shark mounted on a beam, and the figurehead of an old sailing ship, the wooden head and torso of a goddess with red hair. In those days it was a social place, Jack’s studio. Local people moored their boats at his dock and squatted in the sunlight, smoking and murmuring to one another as they watched him work. Children scrambled up onto the dock, and clustered dripping and grinning in the doorway. Others came by with objects for the artist, in hopes of earning a few cents. Men he drank with dropped by, and occasionally some grizzled native of the town would approach the canvas, peer at it closely and murmur a word or two about the colour of the sea, or the plumage of a tropical firebird flying over a volcano, or the figure of a lost girl rooted in the trunk of a ceiba tree.
He introduced to me various characters sitting on his dock and then took me to the back of the studio and hauled out the work he’d been making. Dear god they were strange things! Untreated jute or sacking stretched on knotty sticks, the dimensions uneven and the paint itself having a kind of fatty texture, heaped up thickly on the rough surface and the imagery a raw, passionate, primitive response to the world he lived in. Some of them were six feet on a side, and the colours—the greens, the blues, the purply blacks, the orangey reds, the greenish yellows—had a harsh and acid tone, and were all the same weight somehow, so little air seemed to get through. Perhaps it was my own immediate ambivalence towards Jack’s world which shaped my reaction—the jungle, I mean, the sun, the river, the shacks, the sea, the flies, the trees—the
light
—but growing conscious of these stirrings of bewilderment I knew enough to say that it was strong stuff, although in truth I was profoundly unsure. Later, of course, what had seemed like so much bluster I came to regard as heroic, the sheer scope and ambition of what he did down there.
Years later, when he came back to New York, Jack continued to work out the imagery he first developed in Pelican Road. He told me he would never have worked with such, oh—
grandiosity
—had he not lived in Port Mungo. He found there a reflection of himself, he said, and the meaning of his life as an artist was the effort to translate that identification directly onto canvas. I thought of his repeated motifs, his rain forests and rivers, his serpents and birds, and in particular his gleaming mythic bodies staring into pools—and much as I came to admire the work I never properly understood how he saw himself in those paintings.
It was after Vera had returned from yet another of her boozy journeys—this happened about five years after my visit—that during one of their passionate reunions Peg’s little sister, Anna, was conceived. So I missed the spectacle of Vera Savage, a woman sorely lacking in maternal instinct, and well into her forties by then, giving birth to her second child. Jack had no expectation that her behaviour would be any different from how it was before, nor was it. Once again he took responsibility for the infant girl when, after a few short weeks of half-hearted mothering, Vera became bored with little Anna and began to treat her with what she called “benign neglect.” Jack recognized it as the
The next day Jack took me down to his studio. I remember it vividly. All his work was there and much else besides, all the junk he’d accumulated, plus the work of local painters and others passing through who’d heard of Jack Rathbone’s studio in Port Mungo and come to visit. It was a vast, cavernous space with wooden walls and lofty rafters, and huge doors giving onto the dock through which flooded light reflected off the river, with a wooden scaffold on wheels for getting at the high parts of large canvases. Amid the quantities of stuff in there I remember the jaws of a shark mounted on a beam, and the figurehead of an old sailing ship, the wooden head and torso of a goddess with red hair. In those days it was a social place, Jack’s studio. Local people moored their boats at his dock and squatted in the sunlight, smoking and murmuring to one another as they watched him work. Children scrambled up onto the dock, and clustered dripping and grinning in the doorway. Others came by with objects for the artist, in hopes of earning a few cents. Men he drank with dropped by, and occasionally some grizzled native of the town would approach the canvas, peer at it closely and murmur a word or two about the colour of the sea, or the plumage of a tropical firebird flying over a volcano, or the figure of a lost girl rooted in the trunk of a ceiba tree.
He introduced to me various characters sitting on his dock and then took me to the back of the studio and hauled out the work he’d been making. Dear god they were strange things! Untreated jute or sacking stretched on knotty sticks, the dimensions uneven and the paint itself having a kind of fatty texture, heaped up thickly on the rough surface and the imagery a raw, passionate, primitive response to the world he lived in. Some of them were six feet on a side, and the colours—the greens, the blues, the purply blacks, the orangey reds, the greenish yellows—had a harsh and acid tone, and were all the same weight somehow, so little air seemed to get through. Perhaps it was my own immediate ambivalence towards Jack’s world which shaped my reaction—the jungle, I mean, the sun, the river, the shacks, the sea, the flies, the trees—the
light
—but growing conscious of these stirrings of bewilderment I knew enough to say that it was strong stuff, although in truth I was profoundly unsure. Later, of course, what had seemed like so much bluster I came to regard as heroic, the sheer scope and ambition of what he did down there.
Years later, when he came back to New York, Jack continued to work out the imagery he first developed in Pelican Road. He told me he would never have worked with such, oh—
grandiosity
—had he not lived in Port Mungo. He found there a reflection of himself, he said, and the meaning of his life as an artist was the effort to translate that identification directly onto canvas. I thought of his repeated motifs, his rain forests and rivers, his serpents and birds, and in particular his gleaming mythic bodies staring into pools—and much as I came to admire the work I never properly understood how he saw himself in those paintings.
It was after Vera had returned from yet another of her boozy journeys—this happened about five years after my visit—that during one of their passionate reunions Peg’s little sister, Anna, was conceived. So I missed the spectacle of Vera Savage, a woman sorely lacking in maternal instinct, and well into her forties by then, giving birth to her second child. Jack had no expectation that her behaviour would be any different from how it was before, nor was it. Once again he took responsibility for the infant girl when, after a few short weeks of half-hearted mothering, Vera became bored with little Anna and began to treat her with what she called “benign neglect.” Jack recognized it as the
Similar Books
