paintings
I am a painter.
They say my eyes can pick up the slightest changes in light and shadow, and my hands can give canvas a trembling life.
But at this moment, sitting in this overly tidy and overly quiet room, holding this rough notebook, I feel like a complete illiterate.
I can understand how Monet's water lilies breathe, and how Van Gogh's starry sky burns, but I seem to have never understood the silent, lifelong storm beneath the calm face of the person closest to me.
The smell of paint and turpentine permeates my lungs all year round.
But at this moment, what fills my nostrils is the slightly sour smell of time on this old paper and the lingering scent of soapberries that belongs to him on the pillow.
For the first time, my vision—the sense I overly relied on and trusted—seemed so pale and powerless.
I "saw" him for ten years, from high school to college graduation and then to work, but I never really "saw" him.
The paper beneath my fingertips was rough, with curled and frayed edges.
Those handwritings, from the elegant and flying ones in his youth, to the neat and restrained ones later, and finally to the slight trembling ones at the end, they are not words, but engravings.
It is the fingerprint left by a soul as it struggles to climb the cliff of time. I finally got my "me" back.
My artist’s eye began to work in a whole new way.
I stopped reading "stories" and started reading "traces." I read the thick and thin changes in ink under different moods, the slight pauses in the brushstrokes when mentioning a name, and the tiny smudges caused by possible tears.
Was he smiling as he wrote this stroke? Was he interrupted by a sudden knock on the door and hurriedly finished writing?
I'm not reading.
I am copying.
With my inner eyes, I copy his life, a past that I neither participated in nor discovered.
That "him," myself, is a tall, warm, sunny shadow in his writing. He praised him for being good-looking.
He gave him a hug.
These images are no longer vague concepts in my mind; they begin to have color, temperature, and brushstrokes. I should be able to use Prussian blue mixed with a little alizarin crimson to create the blush on his cheeks at that time, and use soft, almost transparent brushstrokes to depict that throbbing emotion.
Then came the long, gray years.
The colors here become dull, and the brushstrokes become rough and repetitive, like a Munch painting, full of silent screams.
Daily necessities, illness, fever, the difficult end of the year... Behind these words lie countless days and nights of struggle and exhaustion. I suddenly realized that the "peaceful" colors in my memory, the warm aroma of food, the clean paint, were all painted by him, stroke by stroke, using the paint of his own life. On a canvas that could have been gray and rough, he painted a bright and soft dream for me.
And my "reluctance" is the last, sharpest and most abrupt stroke in this long picture.
Like an unignorable crack in the center of Rothko's huge block of color, like a heavy tear that suddenly solidifies in Pollock's wild dripping.
It destroys any complete, established narrative.
It told me that this work titled "Memories", which I thought I had completed long ago, had actually been painted incorrectly.
I drew a symbol, a concept, but never drew a living Zhou Yu with desires and regrets.
I closed the notebook and closed my eyes, but spots of light seemed to dance and reorganize on my retina.
I stood up suddenly and almost stumbled into my studio.
The studio was filled with works, finished and unfinished, and the air was thick with the familiar, reassuring smell of oil paint. But I ignored it all.
I frantically cleared the largest easel, ripped off a half-finished painting of his favorite flowers, which he hadn't waited for to bloom again, and threw it into the corner.
I nailed up a huge, brand new linen canvas. It was so white, so empty, like a silent snowfield, waiting for the first stroke of the brush.
I didn't draft.
I simply grabbed my largest brush and saturated it with paint—not just any ready-made color, but a mad mix of Prussian blue, charcoal black, and a hint of silver—a deep, pregnant gray-black.
I started painting.
I'm not painting his face, I'm not recounting his life. I'm wrestling with paint.
I used a scraper to smear large blocks of cold gray on the canvas, which was his silent dedication; I used quick, dry strokes to sweep out tangled lines, which was his unspeakable fatigue; I sprinkled on a few points of dull brown, which was the mediocrity day after day.
The picture is chaotic, heavy and depressing.
Then I stopped writing. I stared at the hopeless chaos I had created.
My heart is beating wildly.
I found a very thin paintbrush and dipped it in a little extremely thin lemon yellow mixed with a lot of white, almost a fading gleam.
In the center of that heavy gray, I very carefully lit a tiny, blurry dot of light. It was so weak, so fragile, as if it could be blown out by a single breath.
That is my "reluctance".
That was not a cry, not a resistance.
It was only a very weak confirmation of another possibility, like a seed buried under a thick layer of ice, it never broke through the soil, never even sprouted, but it undoubtedly existed.
This tiny point of light, like a sharp knife, instantly pierced through the heaviness of the entire picture.
All the darkness and chaos have changed their nature because of this tiny existence.
They are no longer pure suffering and oppression, they have become the soil that breeds this "unwillingness" and the tragic background that sets off this glimmer of light.
I dropped my paintbrush and backed away until my back was against the cold wall.
I gasped, looking at the newly born storm on the canvas.
I finally painted my first real portrait of him.
It's not about death, but about a bright, talkative idealist, and the faint desire that I couldn't express but that was real.
The rain started to fall again, hitting the glass windows of the studio, the sound was fine and long.
You are so cruel, Zhou Yu.
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