Work Text:
Her studio is located in one of many otherwise empty rooms in her oversize penthouse apartment. There is a workbench to the right of the door, and above that several shelves filled with brushes and jars and tubes of paint. To the left, more shelves, easels, canvases, half-finished paintings and frames. The easels are covered with smears of black and purple, yellow and red and vivid cyan. On one canvas, swirls of paint like black holes and galaxies, black on black, purple on black, blue on black. On another canvas, streaks of cyan and yellow on fiery red-orange. On a third, speckles of color on pure white gesso; on a fourth, nothing but the gesso itself.
Behind those are pieces less abstract: organic shapes like bodies in flesh tones, piled on top of one another on a clinically green background; gleaming chunks of raw, red meat in clear broth; double-helices that wind and unwind, repeating themselves in infinite patterns. Crude, unstudied depictions, perhaps, but the intent is clear. She doesn’t know how to store them; there’s less than two dozen so far, and even if the canvases began to decay, or the colors began to fade, they wouldn’t be of any value to anyone else, anyway.
She paints proteins, sometimes. She likes the shapes that nature gives her—she likes the shapes she invents on her own. Sometimes her therapist asks her to bring the paintings in, if she is willing, so they can be analyzed—so she can be analyzed. It’s a troubled mess, in her head. A difficult one. The paintings might help her to be understood by other people, but what she sees reflected on the canvases is nothing new to her. Flesh and abstractions. She never defines her figures well. Her figures never have faces; she spends much more time getting the proteins to look right, she’ll spend hours layering paint so as to create a perfectly straight line, but she has made hardly any progress at all on the human figure, and she has only been able to paint a face without references once or twice. When she does, they all look sullen, tired, haunted. She doesn’t like the emotions they portray, or how they all seem to be staring back at her.
She paints her dogs. She paints Ernest, her Doberman, in the green hills and forests of her home country. She paints Bunbury, her terrier mix, playing in the Oasis University gardens. They’re crude images—her dogs don’t really look like that, Ernest is really more lean and more graceful, and Bunbury’s fur has more sheen—but she finds painting them to be relaxing.
She takes lessons, off and on. She takes them in Oasis and in Dublin; she takes figure drawing but she is too tall for the easels and her figures are always elongated; she tries charcoal and pastels and watercolors; the watercolors are a disaster. She had become so absorbed in her painting one evening that a woman abruptly asked her to dinner after a class, citing her “zealous and impassioned devotion to her craft,” but she turned her down. The woman was much too young for her tastes, and too modern, and clearly had no idea as to the general interests and disposition of her would-be date.
She signs in the bottom right corner of every canvas, O’Deorain, and then the year, ‘76. But really, her signature is worth less than the canvas it’s painted on.
Her studio is the messiest room in the apartment. The rest she keeps meticulously clean, out of boredom and for her dogs, who, for all their training, still grow temperamental every now and then and chew up her shoes, or the cables, or ruin the upholstery. She takes them for walks every day and pays a sitter to watch them when she cannot; her bedroom closet is filled with dog toys and her kitchen cabinets with dog food and dog treats and strange dog-related implements she doesn’t remember buying. They’ve managed to stay out of the studio, somehow. She considers it a blessing from whoever deity would still bother to listen to her, given how quick she was to abandon a moral code of any sort.
One painting is a portrait of a woman: blonde, blue-eyed, shockingly detailed. Her gaze is firm and judgmental. Her hair is haloed with light. Her collar, otherwise pure white, is speckled with crimson in patterns that suggest the texture and viscosity of blood. The portrait is proud—beautiful, even—painted one sleepless night off of a handful of photographs and the frenetic, single-minded energy of someone who had been demonically possessed, all in one sitting. That one might sell, and, Moira thinks, she would buy it.
Her therapist told her that the hobby would be helpful—that it would give her turbulent mind a means of focus, reflection, meditation. When she stares back at them, all she sees is chaos. Clamor. Unfettered emotion. She might be able to sell the portrait of Angela, the paintings of her dogs. The proteins and the double-helices, though, the bursts of color and thick dabs of paint on the canvas, the meaninglessness, the violence, the bodies, the nothing—those, she intends to keep to herself. And maybe it would be better that way.