The Light's Name was Roger

When asked why he had chosen to move to California, the painter said that North America had a different quality of light from where he lived on the island. He was tired of being overcome with chill and ice and the bleakest of skies. Even if the light he’d grown up with informed his work, so that his paintings all had a silvery glow to them, the light now felt cold and demoralizing. He was sick of a palette of grays.

His agent was aghast. “That is what people appreciate most about your art!” Gemma said, before reading him the opening of his latest review: “The misty cold slides off the canvas and into your bones… you’ll want a warm cup of cocoa when you get home, or perhaps something stiffer.”

He wanted something stiffer.

Because he didn’t move to California only for the light.

“What if you move to Malibu and suddenly you are only able to paint in terracotta and salmon? Turquoise and jacaranda.”

“Jacaranda isn’t a color.”

“You know what I mean.”

His artwork was hanging in high-end galleries and museums in places he’d never visited and some he couldn’t even spell. While others oohed and ahhed over his narrow, almost claustrophobic skylines, he lived a similarly solitary existence… eating his fish and drinking his vodka and engaging in the national pastimes of acceptable alcoholism and depression.

Fantasies had kept him going. Visions of a different world.

He wore Aran wool sweaters and ancient jeans splattered in paint, and he drank hot coffee from a thermos when he walked along the desolate beaches. Alone. Always alone. He’d return to the whisper of a shack he called home, where he painted and tried to sleep. Insomnia plagued him, but when he did dream, he would dream of palm trees.

A gallery in the Palisades reached out through his agent, wanting to do a retrospective including his sketches and his full canvases. They were even going to build a literal replica of his tiny cabin, and they invited him for the opening.

In the past, he would have demurred. Introvert was just a fancy word for how shy he was. Plus he understood his mystique. He grasped that not being the flavor of the month was what had kept him aloft in these artistic circles where a person could be a buzz one day and a hum the next. Even after a decade of being “collectible,” he’d managed to keep an air of vagueness around himself. It wasn’t that difficult since he lived so remotely.

But maybe this was the opportunity he had been hoping for. He knew he could have flown to California any time he wanted. He had the funds and then some. This was different. This was a chance to escape.

He oversaw the careful packaging of his latest creations. The ones that had nearly driven him mad. The ones that would not let him sleep for more than two hours at a time. He had circles under his eyes the color of the sky right before dawn. He had a fierce desire in his belly, or possibly a little lower.

At the show, he listened to the curator speaking in luscious, curly adjectives about his work, and the artsy crowd licked the hyperboles and swallowed the glossy serifs from cross to beak.

It was odd to hear people discuss and dissect to his face. His work, each piece, had a particular meaning to him. He’d never tripped over anyone who fully got him. Oh, they did like to pretend. They used grandiose similes. They took spectacular liberties.

Some tried to corner the artist and make him speak, but he was lithe. He moved like water through the throng, and he watched as a young gentleman in white cords and a tight white shirt sipped sparkling wine and stared at a painting he’d made of a single wave.

Whenever the painter paused, even for a moment, other people gathered around, demanding his attention, wanting soundbites, wanting selfies. After his agent had a pointed moment with him, he patiently gave bits of himself to every journalist and every critic. But when he could finally take a breath, he made his way to the white-clad blond.

He never asked the audience to respond to his work. He was confident in his skills. He didn’t require adulation, and yet…. and yet.

The painter stood next to the flaxen-haired guest, who could so easily have been a model, who someday might be his own model, and he said softly, “What do you think?”

“It’s the light,” the man said without looking at him. He took a small sip of the sparkles in his flute. “I mean, it’s the difference in the light. Because we have an ocean here, right? And I know it’s not the same ocean, but you would think that a painting of the sea might feel similar, and yet this one is …”

He suddenly looked at the painter directly and realized to whom he was talking. He had been so captivated by the painting, he hadn’t noticed he wasn’t speaking to merely another guest.

“I didn’t. I mean, I don’t. I’m no expert.”

“Tell me,” said the painter, and his voice was the low whisper of surf lapping the shore. “I want to hear everything you have to say.”

“I don’t know if I have the words,” the gentleman all in white said, feeling altogether exposed. “It’s so cold, and I can sense chill, and I still want to take off my clothes and walk into the water.”

The painter wanted that, as well.

###

After everyone else left, they went back to the young man’s apartment in Venice. There was sunlight on the canal. There were golden rays in the loft. And to the painter’s unspoken joy, there was a palm tree right out back.

When the painter moved to Southern California, he was interviewed for a magazine. The journalist asked him why he had forsaken his home. The infamous beaches he’d immortalized in his work. The foreboding cliffs and the washed-out sky. Hadn’t his surroundings created him? Who was he to turn his back on his maker?

The painter gave an off-the-cuff comment about moving because he wanted to explore a different quality of light.

But in truth, the light’s name was Roger.