Page 5 of The Singing Trees
Jackie raised both hands, palms up, as if she were carrying a globe—the whole world balancing on her fingers. “You have to. What are you going to learn in Payton Mills? I mean, no offense to the place, but you need to be around other artists. You need teachers. You need inspiration that I’m not sure a small town can give you.”
“I totally agree; believe me.” Moving to the Mills, as many called it, had been a death sentence. Not that Bangor was this big metropolis, but she’d at least had some good friends and a wonderful high school art teacher.
The door swung open behind them, and they both turned to see a well-dressed older woman with fancy jewelry strolling in, carrying a large magenta purse.
Jackie called across the echo chamber of the gallery, “I’ll be with you in just a minute. I’m wrapping up with this talented young lady.” She scooted to the edge of the chair and faced Annalisa. “You just missed it, but Sharon Maxwell does a show every April in the Old Port.Very cutting-edge stuff, some even risqué, but everybody who is anybody is there. Do you know of it?”
“Art news gets to Payton Mills about as fast as new releases make it to the drive-in.”
“Trust me, you should check it out if you ever get the chance,” Jackie said. “I think you’ll find some of the answers you’re looking for.” She clasped the button on the orange tote and handed it back to Annalisa. “I want you to come back and see me. I’d be happy to help you along the way, finding a teacher or whatever it is. And please know that one day, if you keep working at it, I’d be honored to hang your paintings in here.”
Annalisa offered her best closed-lip smile, knowing that she should take Jackie’s words as a compliment, but the reality of the rejection was pulling her underwater, drowning her. “I really appreciate you taking the time to look through them.”
“Oh, the pleasure is mine.” Jackie set her hand on Annalisa’s knee. “I cannotwaitto see your development as an artist. What’s your last name, by the way?”
Annalisa forced herself not to pull her leg back. “Mancuso.”
“I’ll remember your name, Annalisa Mancuso. Good luck to you.” With a last goodbye, Jackie was off to help her customer.
Annalisa pressed up from the chair and left the gallery with her portfolio in her hand and purse on her shoulder. Couldn’t she get a break? As if life were that easy. Even in the worst moments of her life, like when her father was drunk and attacking her mother, or when she’d moved in with her grandmother and had been hopeless, parentless, and afraid, painting had been the thing that had saved her. Not this time.
She rounded the corner and slipped down a quiet alley. Stopping near the back of a seafood restaurant that stank of used frying oil, she let her head fall and broke into a sob. Jackie was right. As confident as Annalisa could sometimes be with her talent, she still hadn’t foundher voice. What if she never found it? Or worse, what if she did and it wasn’t anything extraordinary?
A man burst out of a door with a bag of trash in his hand. As he slung it up into the large dumpster, Annalisa scurried away. Just like her grandmother, she hated for people to see her cry.
Though there had been happy moments in Bangor, her father had never failed to stomp on them. She’d seen her father twirl his mother around the kitchen floor and not thirty minutes later scream at her with spit spraying out of his mouth. If he’d had enough to drink, he would hit her. Though he never hit Annalisa, he’d certainly lashed out at his daughter a thousand times with words that cut so deep she could still hear them when she closed her eyes at night. She was living in a town she hated, nearly broke and surrounded by her father’s family, and all of it could have been fixed if Jackie had just said yes.
After taking a seat on a bench and spelunking through the dark caves of her mind for half an hour, repeatedly revisiting every single word Jackie had said, Annalisa found herself disgusted by her own thoughts.
What would Mary do?she wondered, thinking of Mary Cassatt, the American painter her mother had first introduced her to. Coming of age during the American Civil War, Mary left the closed-minded and male-dominated confines of Pennsylvania for France so that she could expand her mind, find independence, and home in on her creative voice.Yes!Annalisa had always thought when pondering Cassatt’s story.That’s me!
She stood and started along Congress Street to the Portland Museum of Art, which was a bit dated but displayed a few inspiring pieces that Annalisa visited on occasion. If she was to ever become great, it wouldn’t be from that bench, nor wallowing in grief. She had to keep fighting. Art was in her DNA, as Jackie had suggested, and a life without a brush in her hand seemed like a life not worth living.
Deep within the museum, in the center of a quiet room adorned with masterpieces, she sat on a black leather-cushioned bench, sketching an ocean scene by Winslow Homer, who had traveled all over the world but in his later years had lived on the coast of Maine, where he’d explored the power of nature over man.
As part of her lessons on the side porch in Bangor, Annalisa’s mother had urged her to emulate the work of the greats. It was a practice Annalisa did often back in the Mills with the art books she’d check out from the library, and she’d done it a few times here, when she’d been lucky enough to get a ride.
Though she was partial to female artists—anyone from the great Artemisia Gentileschi of the baroque period to the ultimate modernist, Georgia O’Keeffe—Annalisa had taken a fondness to Winslow Homer, in particular his intimate takes on solitude. Often feeling alone herself, she empathized with his subjects, the men who warred with the ocean in their wooden boats, like Santiago inThe Old Man and the Sea.
As she shaded the waves with her charcoal pencil, someone sat beside her. Slightly agitated, considering there was another bench next to this one, she scooted toward the left edge without looking up.
She put her pencil back to work, noticing Homer’s impressive use of value in summoning movement out of the waves. She thought she might try painting an old woman in a boat, paddling through an angry sea. Why did it have to be a man?
“It’s interesting,” the person next to her said, invading her space. “The juxtaposition of this composition conflicts with the atmosphere that he’s trying to create.”
What in God’s name is he talking about?Annalisa wondered.
Apparently, he wasn’t done. “But the precarious nature of his brushwork is too impressionist to allow for any real ethereal motives.”
Cracking a slight grin, Annalisa twisted her head at the ridiculousness. “Let’s hope you’re not studying to be an art critic.”
It was a guy about her age with shaggy blond hair and eyes the color of blue topaz, perhaps a shade lighter. His long-sleeved cotton shirt was unbuttoned enough to reveal blond chest hairs. A couple of wooden beads dangled from a leather necklace. He was coastal Maine preppie, with maybe a little edge, almost like the guy fromBarefoot in the Park. What was his name? Robert Redford. If she’d been forced to admit it, the guy was a hunk.
“Maybe not impressionism but certainly pointillism,” he said, crossing his arms and studying the Homer painting with intense interest. “He’s left no impression on me. The abstract nature goes exactly against what watercolor is trying to be.”
Annalisa set her pencil down and looked at his attempt to bury his smile. “Oil,” she corrected him. “Not watercolor.”
“Ahhhh,” he said. “I’m a sculptor myself, so I’m not as familiar with these mediums.”
