Free The Underpainter by Jane Urquhart Page B

china — urns, platters, pitchers — with what appeared to be the beginnings of paintings on their surfaces. Around him was an air of such intense absorption that it seemed to annul the riot of colour made by the jumble of china all over the store.
    As I tapped on the glass in the door, George started, jumped to his feet, and the piece on which he had been working slipped from his lap and shattered on the floor. My apologies, when he let me in, took the place of the greetings I had planned.
    He laughed then and pointed towards the shelf near which he had been seated. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I have lots of white bodies now, some I’ve already begun to paint.”
    “White bodies?” I lifted my eyebrows and grinned.
    “Undecorated porcelain,” George explained earnestly. He had either missed, or was choosing to ignore, my amused expression. He touched one or two of the scantly painted plates with his fingertips. “I always seem to want to work on several at the same time.”
    When I knelt down to help him collect the fragments for the trash, I saw that he had already begun to paint the compote. There was part of a woman’s face on one of the shards; an eye, the outline of a cheek, the curve of a sensuous mouth.
    “You were painting a woman,” I said, “and now I’ve ruined it.”
    “It was already spoiled,” he said. “It wasn’t working.”
    “You should paint faces on a flat surface,” I told him. “And you should work from a model.”
    George was using a whisk and dustpan to gather the smaller pieces. “Where am I to get a model?” he asked.
    I looked at the passersby beyond the window. “Anyone can be a model,” I said. “Anyone at all. It is line and shape you are trying to explore. You learn all that working with a model.”
    At this time, my only knowledge of female form had come from Robert Henri’s life class; shop girls and aspiring actresses posing for extra cash. They had never seemed quite real to me, though sometimes at night they walked into my dreams in the most intimate of ways. Robert H. had told us it was the artist’s response to the subject, not the subject itself, that was important. He rarely spoke to the girls except to tell them when to break the gesture he had prescribed. I had seen more than one young woman begin to tremble and grow pale under the effortof holding a twisted, difficult pose for more than half an hour when our teacher had forgotten to allow her to rest.
    George was silent, the dustpan poised, a large hand at the end of his wrist.
    “At least with a model you would have something to observe and respond to. Then what you do would be more important.”
    Fragments were pouring, a miniature avalanche, from the dustpan into a tin wastebasket.
    “How do you know this isn’t important,” he said finally.
    In spite of the noise, I heard the sentence he spoke. More of a statement than a question, I am not certain it was really meant for my ears.
    We walked down the length of the shop, opened the door, and stepped outside. The whole summer stretched before us like the main street where the China Hall stood, a street that was essentially a slow, moderately congested section of a central highway leading somewhere else. I watched while George lifted his arm above his head and began to crank an iron handle, watched the canvas awning over the window pull in on itself, fold after fold after fold.
    Now and then during the time that I knew him, George would tell me about the larger industry connected to the decoration of china, about windowed rooms full of men and women painting Minton or Spode, not only in England and Europe but even in Canada, in cities that lay within a day’s journey of Davenport. Toronto and Montreal each had large ateliers where some of the china was given a particularly Canadian flavour. Typicallandscapes from each of the provinces were popular along with detailed renderings of specific flora and fauna. I laughed when George told me about one