Black

My name is Clarity. That is because my mother wanted me to be as beautiful as light and to only speak the truth. She believed that names make you what you are. If she had to name me again, I think she would choose “Sanity”. The way my mind works has been a very unsettling thing for her.

I would tend to agree, but Helen says that actually, my twisted mind has been my greatest success so far. Helen is my agent, she finds clients who buy my work. I am an artist, I paint. Paintings are not a difficult thing to sell if they please the eyes of the bourgeoisie, Helen says. Mines do, so I am selling a lot of them.

This morning at 5:26 am, I finished my 348th painting, oil on a 30x60 canvas. It’s a purple and magenta horse riding on a black sea, though one could hardly manage to see what it is anymore, except that it is dark. It will go well with the sand colours of the rich peoples’ beach houses.
As usual, Helen visits my studio at 8 AM. She knocks on my door and opens it at the same time. She is wearing pink gloves and a hand-knitted white scarf. She is the one who should have been named Clarity. “Seems like this Hollywood Cerise is fitting your style” she says.
I love that about her. She can always tell the exact colours even when all I can see is just “pink” or “blue”. “Have you managed to sell them?” I ask.
“Rather well. They’ve all been taken by this new restaurant, you know, this five stars place I talked about the other day. They paid a high price. They are going for purple and black, you see, and it turned out that this touch of red-pink really did add something”.
“How is the lighting going to be?”
“As you suggested: soft. Candle lights, mostly, and a few bulbs here and there. Nothing too flashy. It’s going to be a chic and intimate place.”
“Good”.
Helen briefs me about the media reviews and latest trends but I barely listen to her. I have been painting all night. My muscles are sore and my arms tremble a little from holding a brush for too long. The restaurant wants to complete the collection, she says.
I will work on a commission. It’s going to be a large 200x250 canvas. This artwork is going to be what everyone who’s anyone will see when they enter the place. It’s going to do the cover of magazines. My painting will be the restaurant’s main feature. No, it will be the restaurant. Therefore, it must be a masterpiece. The restaurant liked my darker work, but now they want something else. They want bright, powerful and vivid. But mostly, they want light.
“What’s wrong with the black?” I ask.
“Nothing wrong, no, nothing wrong. They just want a contrast. A kind of Chiaroscuro of your own definition.”
“I’m not good with light”, I say.
“Clarity, you’re brilliant. You just don’t have the material”. But she does. Helen had planned everything. She’s got the colours in a bag along with pictures of the place. She’ll have the canvas delivered within the day. It’s going to be a very good pay. I should keep painting horses and children, the restaurant liked that theme. I suspect Helen to have made up the last part: how could they see what I was meaning to paint?
So there will be no sleep today. The trouble is, light is not my friend, it panics me. I like to paint with black colours. My work is deep, is dark, is dim. It’s Clarity painting the night.

I make myself two cups of coffee and draws off the curtains. What an irony to be named Clarity and not to know how to paint things white. I start making outlines on my sketch book. The restaurant wants vivid shapes. I would give him curves like if I was painting magma and flames.

You must wonder why I paint black. My mother doesn’t like it. She says it is all the evil of my dark soul projected on canvas. She sees black as the lack of colours, of light, as a nothing. Little does she know that black actually is a strong combination of colours. Black is not empty, it is full. It absorbs the light, it absorbs the heat, it is more mighty and warm than any other pigment. Besides, my first clients thought that it was elegant. “Clarity is the new black”, the press liked to say. Yet it also said I depicted a “world of shadow and unending darkness”, as if obscurity was somehow my distress. Most people fail to see how comforting black is. It is no black hole, it is no chaos. It is quite. Black is silence.

Light is nature’s ultimate fury.

I play around with the colours, simmering my brush into what now looks like a frosty pink. I don’t want pink, it’s cold, and if I am to paint light I must paint it warm. Light had been so warm that night. I first thought I should be painting something mundane, a colour I could call “amaranth” or “alizarin” without feeling pretentious. There will be no pretension. Horses and children, what an irony. I’ve been meaning to paint this for a while. It’s an excruciating path to take.

I was ten. My mother wanted me to play with the upper class kids, so every summer she sent me away to horse riding camp. I went because it made her proud. Besides, I liked the place. I liked the horses, of course, and I spent a lot of time drawing them, but mostly I liked the countryside. I liked the sounds of the nightfall, the frogs croaking, the bats sending ultrasound signals and the owls doing their owl stuff. How fascinating it must be to see what other animals cannot! But children were not allowed to go out at night because it wasn’t safe. The building was inescapable, everything was locked. It wasn’t necessary because the other kids were afraid of the dark: they thought that this was the time when the monsters crept out from beneath their beds. Yet I didn’t fear. I let the protecting mantle of the darkness surround me. At night time, you hear people breathing in their sleep, gentle dreams dancing through their heads. You hear the silence of the world, the hidden little sounds of the invisible. Then you start to think. You start to think about the things that your mind does not understand clearly. You think, you rest, you think, you rest, everything is quiet, and then you see it. You see the truth.

I am like an owl, I only see clear in the dark.

On that particular night, though, it was not normal. The darkness wasn’t dark. The silence wasn’t silent. You could hear the sound of wood cracking, like a campfire, except that the heat was much, much stronger. Then suddenly there were flames, licking the roof, devouring the fabrics with their violent gluttony. We were breathing ashes and red dust. It burned. There were ten of us, but because the building was locked, only eight managed to get out.

I never went to horse riding camp again.

I am brushing large strokes with rapid moves. There are the flames, the forces of destruction and light. What I am doing is raw. It is my pain, my fears, my losses, my cries. It is all what the earth took from me in its enlightened cruelty. I am painting horses and children crushed in a scarlet whirl. They wanted warm? I will give them a combustion. I am sweating from the effort provoked by the strength of my strokes. The canvas is my fight. I rip the colour tube open with a knife and throws white paint in the explosion. My chest feels about to burst. My work looks like a murder scene.

Then comes the night, and I cannot see the light anymore. It’s all dark. My mind stops racing. I remember I haven’t slept or eaten for more than 30 hours. I am tired, but more than that, I feel at peace.

When Helen arrives in the morning, she stands immobile in the front door. My masterpiece is there, disturbing, in front of her.
“Dark tangerine” is all she manages to say.