canvas. Despite three years of endless commissions, the familiar smell of fresh paint excited his senses and, even better, the light behind him was sharp, clear, so he did not have to resort to borrowing Dame Truff’s lantern.
As he progressed,Lake did not know the painting’s subject, or even how best to apply the oils, but he continued to create layers of paint, sensitive to the pressure of the brush against canvas. Raffe had forced the oils upon him months ago. At the time, he had given her a superior, doubtful look, since her last gift had been special paints created from a mixture of natural pigments and freshwater squid ink.Lake had used them for a week before his first paintings began to fade; soon his can vases were as blank as before. Raffe, always trying to find the good in the bad, had told him, when next they met at a cafe, that he could become famous selling “disappearing paintings.” He had thrown the paint set at her. Fortunately, it missed and hit a stranger — a startled and startlingly handsome man named Merrimount.
This time, however, Raffe’s idea appeared to be a good one. It had been several years since he had used oils and he had forgotten the ease of creating texture with them, how the paint built upon itself. He especially liked how he could blend colors for gradations of shadow. Assuming the current troubles were temporary — and that a drop cloth would suffi ce until that time — and even now giving a quick look over his shoulder, he worked on building color: emerald, jade, moss, lime, verdigris. He mixed all the shades in, until he had a luminous, shining background. Then, in dark green, he began to paint a face…
Only the Religious Quarter’s evening call to prayer— the solemn tolling of the bell five times from the old Truffidian cathedral — rousedLake from his trance. He blinked, turned toward the window, then looked back at his canvas. In shock and horror, he let the brush fall from his hand.
The head had a brutish mouth of broken glass teeth through which it smiled cruelly, while above the ruined nose, the eyes shone like twin flames.Lake stared at the face from his nightmare.
For a long time,Lake examined his work. His first impulse, to paint over it and start fresh, gradually gave way to a second, deeper impulse: to finish it. Far better, he thought, that the face should remain in the painting than, erased, once more take up residence in his mind. A little thrill ran through him as he realized it was totally unlike anything he had done before.
“I’ve trapped you,” he said to it, gloating.
It stared at him with its unearthly eyes and said nothing. On the canvas it might still smile, but it could not smile only at him. Now it smiled at the world.
He worked on it for a few more minutes, adding definition to the eyelids and narrowing the cheekbones, relieved, for now that he had come around to the idea that the face
As the shadows lengthened and deepened, falling across his canvas, he put aside his palette, cleaned his brushes with turpentine, washed them in the sink across the hall, and quickly dressed to the sounds of a busker on the street below. After he had put on his jacket, he stuck his sketchbook and two sharpened pencils into his breast pocket — in case his mysterious host should need an immediate demonstration of his skills — and, running his fingers over the ornate seal, deposited the invitation there as well.
A few moments of rummaging under his bed and he had fished out a collapsible rubber frog head he had worn to the Festival of the Freshwater Squid a year before — it would have to do for a costume. He stuffed it in a side pocket, one bulbous yellow eye staring up at him absurdly. Further rummaging uncovered his map. Every wise citizen of Ambergris carried a map of the city, for its alleys were legion and seemed to change course of their own accord.
He spent a nervous moment adjusting his tie, then locked his apartment door behind him. He took a deep breath, descended the stairs, and set off downAlbumuth Boulevard as the sky melted into the orange-green hue peculiar to Ambergris and Ambergris alone.
We find this quality of illumination in almost all of Lake’s paintings, but nowhere more strikingly than in the incendiary “The Burning House,” where it is meshed to a comment on his fear of birds — the only painting with any hint of birds in it besides “Invitation to a Beheading” and “Through His Eyes” (which I will discuss shortly). “The Burning House” blends reds, yellows, and oranges much as “Invitation” blends greens, but for a different effect. The painting shows a house with its roof and front wall torn away — to expose an owl, a stork, and a raven that are burning alive, while the totality of the flames themselves form the shadow of a fire bird, done in a style similar to Lagach. Clearly, this is as close to pure fantasy as Lake ever came, a wish fulfillment work in which his fear of birds is washed away by fire. As Venturi wrote, “The charm of the picture lies in its mysteriously suggestive power — the sigh of fatality that blows over the strangely contorted figures.” Here we may hold another piece of the puzzle that describes the process ofLake ’s transformation. If so, we do not know quite where to place it — and whether it should be placed near or far away from the puzzle piece that is “Invitation to a Beheading.”
A less ambiguous link to “Invitation” can be found in the person of Voss Bender, the famous opera composer nee politician, and the tumult following his death — a death that occurred only three days beforeLake began “Invitation.” In later interviews, the usually taciturnLake pro fessed to hold Voss Bender in the highest regard, even as an inspiration (although, when I knew him, I cannot recall him ever mentioning Bender). More than one art historian, noting the repetition of Bender themes in Lake’s work, has wondered ifLake obsessed over the dead composer. Perhaps “Invitation” represents a memorial to Voss Bender. If so, it is the first in a trilogy of such paintings, the last two, “Through His Eyes” and “Aria to the Brittle Bones of Winter,” clear homages to Bender. — From Janice Shriek ’s A Short Overview of The Art of Martin Lake and
The dusk had a mingled blood-and-orange-peel scent, and the light as it faded left behind a faint golden residue on the brass doorknobs of bank entrances, on the coppery flagpoles outside the embassies of foreign dignitaries, and on the Fountain of Trillian, with its obelisk at the top of which perched a sad rose-marble cherub, one elbow propped atop a leering black skull. Crowds had gathered at the surrounding lantern-lit square to hear poets declaim their verse while standing on wooden crates. Nearby taverns shed music and light in equal quantities, the light breaking against the cobblestones in thick shafts, while sidewalk vendors plied passersby with all manner of refreshments, fromLake ’s ill-starred sausages to flagrantly sinful pastries. Few outside of Ambergris realized that the great artist Darcimbaldo had created his fruit and seafood portraits from life — stolen from the vendors, who arranged oranges, apples, figs, and melons into faces with black grapes for eyes, or layered crayfish, trout, crabs, and the lesser squid into the imperious visage of the mayor; these vendors were almost as popular as the sidewalk poets, and had taken to hanging wide-angle lanterns in front of their stalls so that passersby could appreciate their ephemeral art. Through this tightly-packed throng, occasional horse-and-carriages and motored vehicles lurched through like lighthouses for the drunk and disorderly, who would push and rock them at every opportunity.
Here, then, in the flushed faces, in the mixing of dark and light, in the swirling, shadowy facades of buildings, were a thousand scenes that lent themselves to the artist’s eye, butLake, intent on his map, saw them only as hindrances now.
And more than hindrances, for the difficulty of circumnavigating the crowds with his cane convincedLake to flag down a for-hire motored vehicle. An old, sumptuous model, nicer than his apartment and prudently festooned with red and green flags, it had only two drawbacks: the shakes — almost certainly from watered down petrol — and a large, very dirty sheep with which he was forced to share the back seat.
Man and sheep contemplated each other with equal unease while the driver smiled and shrugged apologetically (to him or the sheep?), his vehicle racing through the narrow streets. Nonetheless,Lake left the vehicle first, deposited at the edge of the requested neighborhood. The nervous driver sped off at top speed as soon asLake had paid him. No doubt the detour to deliverLake had made the sheep late for an appointment.
As for the neighborhood, located on the southeastern flank of the Religious Quarter,Lake had rarely seen one grimmer. The buildings, four and five stories high, had a scarcity of windows that made them appear to face away from him — inward, toward the maze of houses and apartments that contained his destination. Such stark edifices gaveLake a glimpse of the future, of the decay into which his own apartment building might fall when the New Art moved on and left behind only remnants of unkept promises. The walls were awash in fire burns, the ground level doors rotted or broken open, the balconies that hung precariously over them black with rust. In some places,Lake could see bones worked into the mortar, for there had been a time when the dead were buried in the walls of their own homes.
Laketook out his invitation, ran his hand across the maroon-gold threads. Perhaps it
