Painter of Silence by Georgina Harding

Author:Georgina Harding
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2012-09-29T05:00:00+00:00

She does not know how much effort it took him to begin his drawing. How long he had sat poised before the first scrap of paper, seated before the table with his back to the balcony and the sunlight, doing nothing morning after morning, until he put down the pencil and took up his scissors and found it easier to cut than to draw. How he would go back the next morning and lay out another piece of waste paper – at first he took only waste paper, never the clean white pages they had given him – some piece of brown paper or wrapping or a torn envelope, smoothing it where it was crumpled, taking up the sharpened pencil again, fighting what had become a deep and habitual resistance against making his mark, breaking through the shells of himself until at last they cracked, one through to another, lightly as eggshells, and how he then began, tentatively at first as if drawing on eggshell, the shadow of his hand moving on the paper beside the lines as he made them.

The first drawing was tiny, made on a scrap of brown paper no bigger than a cigarette packet. On it he drew his bed in the corner against the window, the rectangle of the window and the panes across it, then the details, the lines of floorboards, the floral wisps of Irina’s once-fashionable wallpaper, his pillow on the bed. Though they had given him colours he made the picture entirely in pencil, shading it until the floor was glossy and the pencil was worn down and his fingers were blackened with graphite. When the picture was done to his satisfaction, shaded dark, so small that it fitted into the palm of his hand, he folded it down to the size of a postage stamp and put it aside, then he began on a different corner of the room, until he had all four corners of the room folded together in his pocket. This miniature representation of his refuge he kept to himself like an amulet for safety. Only then did he begin again, on larger scraps but still not touching the sketchbook, and these he allowed himself to show her.

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