“Oui, oui,” Sebastien said, clearly not embarrassed by Margie’s outburst. “Painting is so much about the light. Come, here, see this one.”
He took her close to a painting, this one with tiny smudges of green and white and pink and purple, as though paint had been splattered and then smeared across the canvas. But when they stepped back, Margie saw it—in the foreground, a profusion of wildflowers, stretching back, a field of grasses and flowers and trees. “It’s amazing,” she breathed. “It hardly looks like anything, and then it becomes so clear. Look at them.” She pointed to a blur of darkness toward the back, so formless and yet so obviously two people standing amidst the greenery.
“Our eyes do much of the work.” He touched his face as he spoke, gesturing to his own eye, and Margie watched his movements, those impossibly long, slender fingers, the fine bones of his face. He was like a painting himself, all perfect lines and balanced symmetry, the warmth of his skin and the gold in his hair a perfect match for the light coming through the gallery’s front window. “It is a miracle, yes? The Impressionists know precisely how to balance clarity and color so we will see something that is not clear at all.”
He walked her through the gallery, pointing at the paintings that had come between the Impressionists and his work, and though Margie could not have named the progression of styles, she could see it happening from one painting to the next, images blurring and then refocusing, growing clear and then unclear again in new ways. Figures grew square and folded in on themselves as though they had been caught in a broken mirror, or stayed as clear as the lines of a portrait while turning nonsensical—landscapes filled with trees covered in human eyes, a woman’s ball gown with a basket beneath it like a hot-air balloon, both familiar and unsettling.
“Do you like this one?” Sebastien asked. He stopped in front of a painting of a woman dressed for a party in a pink dress, the skirt falling into uneven, loose lines at the bottom, so you could almost see it fluttering. She wore a long rope of pearls and her hair was shingled fashionably close to her head. Though she wasn’t looking at the artist, it was clear she was aware of being watched, and she was used to it. She wasn’t quite beautiful; her nose was too strong and her eyes too wide, and she was broad-shouldered and turned in such a way that she took up nearly the entire frame. There were none of the mind-bending mirror-folds of some of the other paintings, where it looked more like the subject had been folded and refolded like paper, but neither were her angles entirely clear, and her edges were soft, as though she were in motion. A curious feeling of jealousy settled in Margie’s chest.
“I do. She’s beautiful. And the painting is almost . . . alive. It’s like she knows I’m looking at her, but she doesn’t want to look back.”
“This is mine,” Sebastien said proudly. “I am glad you like it.”
“This is yours?” Margie breathed, and she turned back to the painting, looking at it again, now less as a piece of art and more a link to its creator. She wondered what she could learn about Sebastien from this—who was the woman and what was their relationship that she refused to look at him? And how did he know her form so precisely, the shape of her under the dress, the way it fell on her body? Margie blushed to think of it, and then called herself silly—the woman was fully dressed, after all. And she wasn’t classically beautiful, maybe Sebastien saw something in her, maybe artists saw beauty differently, maybe he saw Margie differently.
“I love it. What do you call it?”