Night Blue Read online

  MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

  www.transitlounge.com.au

  Copyright © 2021 Angela O’Keeffe

  First published 2021

  Transit Lounge Publishing

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Cover design: Peter Lo

  Front cover image: ©Tim Gartside/Trevillion Images

  Internal cover image: Blue Poles by Jackson Pollock reproduced with permission of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the National Gallery of Australia

  Author image: Geoff Warleigh

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  A cataloguing entry is available from the

  National Library of Australia

  ISBN: 978-1-925760-77-4

  for Sophia

  in memory of Eileen and Mick

  Part One

  Blue Poles

  The painting has a life of its own.

  Jackson Pollock

  1

  I began one night in 1952 in a barn on Long Island, New York. Jackson unrolled a piece of Belgian linen, five metres by three, onto the floor. He liked to work on the floor, to be able to walk around and around a painting; to feel like he was part of it, in it, he said.

  He left the canvas and went to the window, looked out to the darkness, breathed. It was raining. A cigarette between his lips, smoke floating out towards the rain. I don’t know how long he stayed there-minutes, years. I was not yet colour, and time had not settled in me.

  He turned and made his long-limbed amble across the room, crouched before his tins of paint, prised one open.

  The smell of me.

  He stood over the canvas, angled the tin.

  Years later, I heard that another artist, a friend of Jackson’s, had been there the night I began; that they wielded paint and ideas along with Jackson. But if they were there I didn’t notice them. I was only aware of Jackson. Of his paint-spattered dungarees and the impulsive grace of his movements, and his gaze that sought me as one seeks a horizon. To dream into, to orient oneself.

  There were layers of days and frowning and sometimes laughter, and outside the rain came and went, came and went, and the smoke of his cigarette went out the window to it. He circled me, giving me drizzles of colour and particles of glass; he was like a bird fussing over its nest.

  When he left me alone I watched the sky through the window turn from grey to blue to black. When he returned the open door let in the smell of the marshes behind the barn. He moved around me, all elbows and knees, a gangly dance by which he gave me not only colour and shape but memories: the shadow of an ash tree from his Arizona childhood, a recurring dream in which he ran towards his mother’s open arms but never reached them. What his wife, Lee Krasner, once said to him at Penn Station as they stood side by side about to board a train; said not in words but through the skin of her arm pressed to his:

  We are silence, Jackson.

  His life gathered in his gestures. His gestures gathered in me.

  One day he picked me up off the floor and tacked me to a high beam that ran against the back wall of the barn. Light slanted at new angles. My perspective shifted. Through the window I saw the edge of a tree, a road, the shingle-grey corner of a building. I supposed it was where Jackson lived. He applied paint with a brush, letting it drizzle down me in crooked lines. I hung there for days as the paint ran down me, through me, sometimes hurrying, sometimes meandering, like time itself.

  Then one morning he took me down from the beam and returned me to the floor.

  On the night he finished me he stood looking at me for a long time. He reeked of alcohol, a smell I was used to by then. It was only later that I realised alcohol was not a human need like water or air. His eyes shone with a question; I couldn’t tell what it was, yet it filled me with a wild hope. It seemed to hold out a promise.

  He left, the door closing, and I thought it was the last I would see of him that night, but he soon returned carrying a long, straight piece of timber. He went to his paints and opened a tin.

  Dark blue.

  He dipped the timber in the paint, then lay it sodden against me, over and over. His movements gained momentum; at one point, he kicked off his boots and they sailed and thudded into a corner. He lay the timber against me, then away, against me, then away. His gestures had a strange calm, a kind of emptiness. There were no memories, no images, as I was used to. He had reached some end in himself, some end in me.

  2

  I was part of Jackson’s solo exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York later that year. People gathered with glasses of wine in hand. They stepped back to take in the entirety of me; they stepped forward to peer at particulars. One man said I looked like a burnt fence. A woman referred to me as ‘a landscape’ and another corrected her – ‘Jackson Pollock doesn’t paint landscapes.’

  ‘An inner landscape, then,’ the first woman persisted.

  A man told the story of a plumber living near Jackson who’d called his paintings ‘messed up road maps’. His companions laughed.

  ‘You can see his point,’ one said.

  The show was not a triumph. Only one painting sold – not me. Afterwards, the reviews were in agreement: Jackson had reached the heights of his success a few years earlier when he’d appeared on the cover of Life magazine with the headline, ‘Jackson Pollock. Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?’ Though showing touches of brilliance, the show had failed to answer that question with a resounding yes.

  I only became aware of this much later, in the calm white room of the gallery in which I’ve hung for decades, on the other side of the world from where I began. A guide was telling my history to a group of tourists with red-stung cheeks and lank hair – there must have been a cold wind blowing off the lake outside, typical of Canberra in August.

  Or, rather, the guide was telling my outer history. My inner history I am telling you.

  3

  The day after the show Jackson came into the gallery and he and Sidney Janis, the gallery owner, lifted me off the wall and laid me on the floor. Jackson leaned over me; his cheeks hung in narrow strips. I couldn’t read his expression. He reached forward and ripped me from my frame, using such force that the nails that had held me in place flew like bullets to the edges of the room. Janis seemed surprised, turning his long, angular face from Jackson to the nails spinning across the floor, and then to me, but he said nothing. Then together they rolled me up and carried me into a back room and left me next to a fire extinguisher, where I remained for many days.

  Eventually I was reframed and returned to the barn and leaned against the back wall. It was summer. The air was soft. Through the window the leaves were bright. Jackson brought a man and a woman to see me. They stood together, murmuring, in the rays of dusty light. After they left Jackson went on gazing at me, standing so close I could see the remnants of old paint embedded beneath his nails. At one point his eyes grew bright and I thought he might speak—not aloud but through his thoughts. But he turned from me and went to his tins of paint, and then to a canvas that lay spread on the floor and began to move around it, flicking colour from a thin brush, his gaze dreamy, intense. I watched him work all through that day, and the next; I heard the soft thud of his boots and smelt the smoke of his cigarette, I heard him swear, laugh, cough. Once, as he paused to light a cigarette, his big hand sheltering the flame, he looked my way. But I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. His thoughts and his memories were closed to me.

  I was sold, laid in a crate and taken in a vehicle and hung on a wall inside a house. I
heard later that it was a beautiful house, but I don’t remember it as beautiful. I kept thinking of how Jackson had shut me out, and the atmosphere in that house seemed to amplify this. The man and woman who’d come to see me at the barn lived there. They were kind, attentive to what they thought were my needs: they never touched me or let the sun fall on me; the temperature in the room never varied; the light came from a dim lamp; it was difficult to tell day from night. There was a window near me but the curtain was always drawn. I could have died in that house had I not been sold again.

  You might ask how a painting can die when it is not in physical danger. But that is a misunderstanding of how a

  painting lives.

  4

  My next home was an apartment on the Upper West Side in Manhattan. There was a window nearby and its curtain was always open. Through the window I could see over a large park with many trees. There were tall buildings along the edge of the park, with the sky resting above. I watched that sky change from grey to blue to dark blue; with the lights from the buildings shining upwards, it was never black.

  Over time, I witnessed the trees in the park lose their leaves, I witnessed snow fall through bare branches, and new leaves form. I noticed that although each tree in the park stood alone, none could be described as lonely. That even those set at a distance from others stood in such a way as to invite in the space around them, as if space itself were a presence. An odd giddiness began to pervade me, a desire to reach, like the trees, towards the open space. And so it was at that window I first sensed my destiny.

  Destiny might seem a grandiose word, but there is nothing closer. I’m not saying that I knew that in 1973 I would become the most expensive modern painting in the world, that I would travel to Australia where I would be both derided and admired, that one November afternoon I would witness the anguish of a prime minister. I’m not even saying that these things were my destiny – at least, they weren’t the central parts of it. Instead, they were the outer workings of something far more private.

  A man and a woman and their two children lived in the apartment. The children, a boy and a girl, ran through the rooms shouting excitedly, music was played, meals were eaten, conversations went back and forth. The man sat in a chair near me and spoke on the telephone while looking out the window, his voice was warm, gravelly, often he laughed. The girl sat on the sofa and turned the pages of a book, every now and then she put the end of her pigtail in her mouth. She read passages from the book to her mother, who watched her daughter’s face in the same dreamy way Jackson had watched me, studying particulars, the shape of lips and nose, the light on a cheek.

  The boy played with a Frisbee, sailing it back and forth across the room. Once it hit me and his mother said mildly, ‘Darling, can you take that into your room?’ and I felt a small thrill of belonging. I was hardly more special than the sofa or the rug: I was no longer an exhibit to be tiptoed around or treated with anxiety. I was a member of a household.

  There was an air of ambivalence around me during those days; ambivalence is different to being ignored, it has acceptance in it, a kind of ease. I don’t recall being actively looked at, studied, except on a few occasions when the rest of the family were out and the woman stood before me, her gaze meandering across me this way, that. Sometimes her eyes brightened as an idea took form in her. Once, she leaned forward and kissed me, her lips softer than the finest brush.

  The little boy and girl grew up. Their bodies changed, but their minds changed more. They no longer felt the urge to run. Frisbees did not interest the boy, the girl no longer read aloud to her mother. They became attuned to the world beyond the apartment, their eyes gleaming with a certain distance. I couldn’t read their thoughts – that skill would come much later – but I sensed the direction of them, the pitch of them, especially those of the girl. As she lay on the sofa staring past me towards the window I caught glimpses of the bright, crowded places where her life would lead.

  My own thoughts were never far from Jackson. On rainy nights I would recall the night he started me, when he stood at the window and the smoke of his cigarette went out to the rain. On clear nights I thought of the night he finished me, when he lay the blue-soaked plank of wood against me, his movements empty.

  One day the woman went out and did not return home. She was dressed in khaki trousers and boots, an outfit that reminded me of the way Jackson used to dress. She’d often left the apartment dressed like this, and in the evening returned speaking enthusiastically of the reach of certain plants and the density of hedges and the colours of birds, for she was a designer of gardens.

  When night fell her husband arrived home and came into the living room, where the girl and boy sat at either end of the sofa, the girl with her head in a book, the boy flicking through a magazine. A lamp shed golden light from the corner. He stared at them with an odd, hesitant expression, until they looked up. He took a breath. ‘Your mother’s dead,’ he said softly, and as he said the words he seemed to observe the sound of them, the shape of them, as if the words themselves were strange to him. ‘She had a car accident.’

  ‘No!’ said the girl.

  ‘She was at a garden,’ said the boy, as if this, too, was a refutation.

  ‘She was on her way home from the garden.’ He went on staring at them, as if they were as strange as the words he’d uttered, his long arms hanging by his sides, and now they got up and came to him and they all held one another, while outside the lights of the buildings shone upward in the blue night.

  The apartment felt different after that. On the surface the activities of the boy and girl and their father were much the same as they’d always been: they read, they talked, they ate, they walked dreamily, distractedly from one room to the next. But there was an air of suppressed anticipation in the way they went about these activities, as if they sensed something should happen, yet couldn’t happen, as if some exquisite note were about to be played but remained silent. It was my first exposure to grief. In this case it was the grief of others. But I would come to experience my own, in time.

  One afternoon the family gathered in the living room. The girl by that time had a boyfriend, a skinny young man with a wispy beard. They sat together at one end of the sofa, holding hands. Her brother slouched in an armchair wearing basketball boots and a burgeoning moustache. Their father settled at the other end of the sofa with his new wife, for he had re-married the year after his first wife’s death. His second wife had children of her own and now the apartment was filled once again with the ring of young children’s cries and laughter.

  Each member of the family spoke about me in turn, and in the past tense.

  The girl went first. She said that as she grew up I gave her an appreciation of ‘messy beauty’. She said the word ‘messy’ as if it were something coveted, rare. A tear appeared on her cheek. Her boyfriend reached out a finger and wiped it away. Then he said that although he hadn’t known me very long he would never forget ‘how cool’ it was to sit in a room with me.

  The boy spoke next. He said little, yet the underlying fervour in his tone conveyed more than his scant words. He said he’d learned a lot about basketball by looking at me.

  His father smiled.

  ‘Not by watching basketball?’

  The boy blushed.

  ‘The painting taught me about movement, and … and … you know.’ He shrugged.

  ‘I think I do,’ said his father, and he went on to say that he’d been able to appreciate what was past and what was to come, because of me. His wife and step-children also spoke, but I don’t remember their words. It is the words of the original family that have stayed with me, especially those of the father, for they planted the seed of an idea that would later prove crucial to me – that life was made as much from the future as it was from the past.

  That night he sat near me and spoke on the telephone.

  ‘I’m selling Blue Poles, it’s going to Canberra.’ His gaze raked over me. He listened as the person at the end of
the line spoke, then he laughed softly. ‘Canberra is the capital of Australia,’ he said.

  I wasn’t surprised to learn I’d been sold again, not after what had taken place that afternoon. The formality of the goodbye alone in that informal household gave me a sense of the distance I was about to travel.

  What surprised me – shook me would be more accurate – was my name. Blue Poles. When Jackson painted me he called me Number 11 and that was how I’d always thought of myself, as a number rather than a name. Over the years in this gallery where I now hang, the tour guides frequently point out that Jackson believed that all the parts of a painting were equal and a name interfered with that. A name made the viewer home in on one idea, instead of taking in the work as a whole.

  Now I was called Blue Poles. Named after the element that had been added right at the end when he’d placed the blue-soaked plank of wood against me with that strange absence of feeling. I found out later that it was Jackson who’d changed my name not long after he’d finished me; he’d thought I’d sell better with a proper title. At least, that’s what the guides claim, as they bring me groups of school children and tourists and summarise my story in neat, ten-minute stops, as if my secrets, and Jackson’s, were so easily unlocked.

  5

  The following morning in New York some men had come and removed one of the walls of the apartment so that I could be lowered on ropes outside of the building, for I was too large to fit in the elevator. I was placed inside a wooden crate, as I had been every time I was to be moved, but this time I experienced something new. Despite being shut in the darkness of the crate I was able to see what was going on beyond it as I was lowered to the street, not through a peephole in the crate – there was no such peephole – but through some aspect of my own self.

  I saw the trees in central park below me and the narrow sky with its thin wisps of cloud above, I saw people stopping in the street and staring upwards, shading their eyes as they followed my trajectory as if it in some aspect mirrored the trajectory of their own lives.