The Threshold of Light
An imaginative composed Jess (Year 12 Advanced)
Before her perched a girl of milky skin and stiffened posture. Scarcely come of age; her fleshy cheeks still subtly flushed with innocence. She was the sort Elise had grown accustomed to painting, although her corset was especially taut of all the aristocratic ladies ushered in front of her easel. The subject- Lady Adelaide of Durham- sat atop the cold stool with her chin slightly lifted, rigid with what Elise discerned as born-and-bred compliance. She was the young woman of whom the ruling classes were recently enamoured with, hence the commissioning of her portrait to adorn the new civic building. The request of the commission was deceptively simple; ‘capture her essence.’
Elise quietly scoffed as she peered down at the palette she had been mandated to use, of which rested on her knee; a laughable spectrum of cold whites, dulled with ivory blacks, as well as several buttermilk yellows, tired browns, and the occasional muted rose.
Not exactly monochromatic, but nothing to sing about, either.
Elise dipped her brush into a milky peach shade and directed it to the undercurve of the portrait’s jaw. The colour settled obediently, smudged by her brush to ensure the edges remained soft and undefined. She glanced beyond the canvas and towards the lady, flinching slightly as her gaze settled upon not the soft curve of glossed lips of which she had blended into a stillness, but constricted pupils that nursed a flicker of cruelty. A further glance betrayed a wisp of purple beside her left cheekbone that attempted to hide beneath copious layers of powder. The benefactor’s directive to ‘capture her essence’ bounded to the forefront of her mind.
What the elderly gentlemen expected was not a series of layered glazes coaxing shadows into warmth, but, rather, to adhere to the implicit tradition to wash the virtuous in light; to let brightness crown their cheekbone, and cast the unsightly crows-feet and unmoored gaze into a pleasing blur. Elise had grown tired of this binaric censorship.
Light could be made to lie with the same ease as shadow could reveal.
A face could be cruel and kind in the same hour.
To paint the lady solely with the hues of the former was a decision not driven by aestheticism, but by the adherence to the theatrics of reputation, where colour and composition were less pertaining to truth than to a deliberately constructed narrative. Furthermore, Elise always found an absurdity in the request to distil a person’s essence into brushstrokes, as though it were a fixed thing; an arrangement of tones and angles that may be wrung from an individual like water from a cloth.
She had felt this same hesitation that stalled her brushstrokes last May. Elise had been perched several metres from a governess who appeared notably more worn than most of her clientele; the sort of fatigue earned through tireless exertion as opposed to resignation. By then, she had begrudgingly submitted to the social mandate of portraits that featured smooth, gentle angles and muted warm tones; and that is what she had painted that evening. Upon her viewing, the governess had murmured quietly if the revised painting could include her crooked nose. She complied wordlessly, her brush trailing the faint arc of shadow that bent around the woman’s nose and curving towards a wavering certainty.
Elise rinsed her brush, her gaze trailing the streaks of milky peach as they dissipated into the rag as if they were never quite real to begin with. Elise attempted to appear natural as she excused herself for a glass of water, and returned clutching another palette. Then, without ceremony, she reached for a cooler tint- a pale amalgamation of blue and grey that was usually reserved for cobblestone backdrops- and worked it into the cheek that was turned towards the morning light. The rays now cut harshly across the cheekbone, shadows pooling near the eye socket and towards the crook of the neck. The conventional highlight still lingered; although, it was now undercut by a quiet dissonance that softened the flesh into something less articulate. To the other, ‘unsullied’, half of the portrait, Elise added another glaze of burnt umber to complement the warmth gathering at the temple.
She sat back, grumbling as her dress became entangled in the legs of her stool.
From a distance, the painting appeared to be a manifestation of the very binaries Elise regarded with disdain- as though two hands had attempted to paint the same woman at a different hour.
The woman in question remained still as ever, her growing weariness betrayed only by the tightening of her jaw. Elise had heard of Lady Adelaide’s unease in social settings; a peculiarity that crawled beneath the polished composure expected of her, and one that she was commissioned to blur beneath layers of saffron yellows.
A subtle tension had draped itself amongst the timber ceiling planks; a subdued dissonance where the girl before her existed simultaneously within and beyond the confines of what constituted an aristocratic lady.
In this moment, the portrait transcended mere resemblance.
It had matured into a meditation on the fine boundary between appearance and the authentic self revealed only by shadowed contours, when exposed to light.
