Travel & CultureDuke FORM

A 21st Century Artist Encounters Painted Wood

Travel & CultureDuke FORM
A 21st Century Artist Encounters Painted Wood

Dear reader,

My morning was rather empty. It was all spent up working on translations—a task of necessity rather than choice.

By afternoon, I felt myself empty. As if my entrails had oozed out through my fingernails while I had been typing away. My neck craned upwards, searching for what, though, I’m unsure. But there was no time to be lost to aimless wondering, and I quickly composed myself to go for a walk.

I live in Silver Lake, LA. A neighborhood of wealthy hipsters, for the most part.

The mirror by the door drew me in for only the briefest of seconds, but the impression lingered. My eyes looked supple and warm, but my neck and cheeks were worryingly withered, almost hollow—they’ve only been getting worse and worse lately. I can’t figure out why.

The sun was bright outside—I could tell—but it didn’t feel bright. Like something in my brain was supposed to be firing away so that I could feel the sun’s warmth, but a faulty synapse had sent everything to shit. Most sunny days have been like this, of late. I’m probably depressed but aren’t we all? 

Soon everyone living in Silver Lake—even the kids on the elementary school playground—won’t be able to feel the sun’s brightness, much less its warmth. There are days when I walk outside, though, and the sun is blindingly bright, which thankfully inspires the bejeebers back into me. At least for a little while, I feel welcomed back into nature. Life is reimagined.

As I walked along my street, I let my hand twirl lightly by my side, touching the various textures around. For an instant, I passed over the rough wood grain of the oak tree—a life circumscribed to its own assigned square meter of the roadway, lined up uniformly with the other trees, but maintaining individuality all the same. In just that instant, the tree sparked a something in my individuated inner world. A flash. It quickly died, though, leaving me emptier than before.

I continued walking, almost dancing, as it were, but not feeling anything. One foot would assume energy and swing wide on its opposite side, heel flashing out, only for my body to rotate back in the other way, forcing my second foot to mirror the action of the first, throwing my body into a symmetrical oscillating pattern. Thinking about it now, I imagine I looked pretty.

The crucial moment—the reason I am writing this all out for you, dear reader—was entirely unexpected. 

A door frame standing door-open and vertical across the breadth of the sidewalk threw me into virile consternation. An ordinary door, to be sure, but far out of place. It was painted brown, but the paint was peeling back, exposing the wood grain below. I stepped forward tepidly, unsure who’d put it there, what the meaning was, whether it was meant for me in particular. The paint was remarkably opaque where it remained intact. My mouth hung open as I moved into the close-up focus.

I circled its edges, trying to locate its connection to the world around it—how it stayed upright. It didn’t cross my mind to reach out and touch it. Either I ceased to be real or it never became real—regardless, there never seemed to be the possibility of contact between this door and myself.

Just by looking, though, I felt the same something that the tree had evoked—to my utter incredulity. As if I’d suddenly fallen in love with someone who I’d felt perfectly indifferent towards for years. It was a surprise, that is, to find this object so out of place and so similar to its ancestor in the natural world

I checked over my shoulder and stepped through the door. As I looked down at the concrete on the other side, another spring of that something hit me. If you expect happiness at this point, don’; it was rather bewilderment, and bewilderment strong enough to block out the sun. Don’t get me wrong, I was loving life, but “happiness” is too calm a word to capture what I felt just then. 

I ran back through the doorway, headed for my easel so that I could come back and paint the scene. I bolted up my stairway, dumped out my backpack and refilled it with my special occasion paint and brushes. Backpack loaded and shouldered, all I had to do was grab canvas and stand. On my way out, I swung the stand wide and shattered the mirror. I laughed and kept moving.

The door-open vertical door frame was only a block away, and I took off. Before long, I realized it was gone. My stomach dropped, but I kept myself together and went to the tree. 

I won’t bore you here—the painting turned out empty and lifeless. As you can imagine.

I’ve never hallucinated and don’t believe the door-frame was an exception to that. It felt like an other. And also like the artistic subject I’ve been looking for my whole life. I sobbed in soft shudders as I walked back to my apartment.

As I passed through in the doorway, I was confronted by the broken mirror. And much more importantly, by the fragmented self-reflection peering back at me from its milky depths.

WORDS BY AUSTIN SMITH