Paving the New Road by Sulari Gentill

Author:Sulari Gentill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pantera Press

Edna walked into the studio and gasped as she stopped behind Rowland. He was still working, although Eva had left over two hours before to prepare for her evening with Herr Wolf.

“What happened?” she demanded.

“Don’t you like it?”

Edna scrutinised the portrait of Eva, lightly painted with soft strokes, a startling, gentle likeness. It was a nude but it was to the face of the subject that one was drawn. Her eyes gazed dreamily from the canvas, her fairness almost luminescent against the darkness of the background. There was a tender and romantic quality to the work. “It’s lovely, Rowly, but where’s the one you started by the lake? Didn’t you finish it?”

Rowland rubbed his head. “Yes … it’s on Clyde’s easel.” Both Clyde’s easel and the canvas on it faced the wall.

“Then what’s this?” Edna said, glancing back at the new portrait.

“I think I might have got rather carried away with the other one. I decided I’d better paint another piece for Eva.”

“Didn’t she like the first one?”

“She hasn’t actually seen it … I came to my senses before I showed her and just started this one.”

“Didn’t you like it?”

“No, I did … I just think Eva is expecting something rather more traditional.”

Edna couldn’t resist any longer. She turned Clyde’s easel around and stood back to view the canvas. “Oh, Rowly.”

“What do you think?” Rowland asked tentatively. The painting was an experiment with a style quite outside his usual.

Edna didn’t say anything for a while, as she studied the finished work. Rowland had rendered Eva’s face in the same eggshell blue as he had painted her naked body. The lines were familiar. The almost reverential portrayal of her form, glorying in every curve, was distinctly Rowland Sinclair. He’d captured the cherubic roundness of her face but he’d washed out her features so they were mere hints of likeness. All but her eyes. In those he’d caught a kind of furtive, subjugated vibrancy and an overwhelming sense of desperation and hopelessness. To Edna, it was strange and beautiful and sad.

“You’ve never painted me this way, Rowly.”

“I don’t paint anybody the way I paint you,” he replied quietly. He glanced at the canvas and laughed. “Perhaps I’m just trying to keep up with von Eidelsohn.”

Edna smiled. “I wouldn’t think you’d need to do that. This looks just like Eva, but you wouldn’t guess it if you didn’t know. It’s so heartbreaking … more like her than any of my photographs.”

“Still,” Rowland said, absently wiping his hands on his waistcoat, “I think she may prefer the other one.”

“Perhaps.” Edna turned to observe him critically. The canvas, it seemed, had not received all the paint. “You’d better get cleaned up … It’s getting late.”

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