Studio Days

Painting, Writing and Musing

Scribble Scribble. He was finding it difficult to paint lately. Every once in a while, he’d take what Truman Capote once called (in Breakfast at Tiffany’s) “a wild boyish fling at writing” to make up for it. It never really came to much.

Moon Man. The first painting he made, when he did start seriously back to work, showed a balloon-like jostle of forty moons--blue, white and violet. He had taken it from a Kleenex Box.

The Oracle. Sometimes, when he was out of ideas, he’d just sit by his oracle, which would whisper to him suggestions from the sea.

White Chrysanthemums.

Normally he found it irritating when his landscape-painter neighbour Abigail would slip bits of salutary and supposedly “improving” poetry under his studio door, but yesterday she had rather over-reached herself. She had given him a tiny, haiku-like poem by the Japanese poet Ryota (1718-1787), both in a translation by Kenneth Rexroth--that he didn’t like much--and in a word-by-word transcription by someone named Harold Henderson. This latter version he liked much better. Here is the whole poem:

not saying anything
guest and host
and white chrysanthemum

He liked the poem so much he decided to take the miniaturization of the poem’s chrysanthemum blossom and make an enormous flower painting in its honour. The smaller the poem, he decided--rather perversely--the bigger the painting. For some reason, his studio assistant McDowell sulked through the entire procedure.