“No. Choosing is part of the process. They want you to present what you consider to be your best work.
Want to see? I’ve chosen three.”
“Why those, and what do you think of them?”
“That they’re good,” she said, tugging me into her studio.
“This abstract one,” she pointed to the painting I had namedStorm, “I know it’s your favorite.” She was right.
Ever since we’d met, I had been naming her works. She never rejected the titles I gave her paintings, sketches, or doodles, and she always remembered them – like a mother remembers her children’s names, even if she has a dozen or more. Naming them was my small contribution to her art.
In my opinion,Stormwas magnificent. The interplay of colors, emphasized by the strokes of the palette knife rather than a brush, let the viewer feel the storm. Two patches of deep blue breathed an extra dimension of life into the painting. Each timeI looked at it, I sensed the inner whirlpool within it, within her, and within me.
To me, Lily had succeeded in transferring her emotions perfectly to the canvas – and from there, straight into the viewer.
She said her instructors at the school thought the painting was good too. No one who saw it could remain indifferent. All the shapes in it seemed ruined, except for two black circles that could give the impression of being inside a ship’s cabin, where all that remained were the walls with two portholes. Or the opposite – that it was an external view of a structure collapsing inward, into the black mass that seemed to swallow the red stain inside it. The victory of the black in this painting was perhaps clear – but certainly not inevitable.
“This is the second,” she said, movingStormaside to reveal an oil on canvas depicting the study of the protagonist in Bernard Malamud’sThe Tenants.
The figure of the author as described in the novel had left a deep impression on her. The imagined description of the study in the book became, in her mind, a reality on canvas. She finished the work in just a few hours, something very uncharacteristic for her. She executed it with a delicate palette knife, though anyone looking at it might have thought it was done with brushwork.
The chair, the table, the coffee cup on it, the bleakness – all of them came across as so human, so sad, so real. As if someone had just left the room moments before. You could almost feel the warmth radiating from the cup. And if you weren’t careful, your gaze might catch on the nail jutting from the wooden board that replaced the window, and you’d feel it pierce you. The painting was realistic, yet still so abstract.
It wasn’t clear whether the protagonist who had just left the room would ever return to the center of the work. The painting left a deep impression on me, along with several unanswered questions.
“So, we’ve got one abstract and one semi-figurative,” I summarized. “And the third?
“A model – but this time in color, not just a sketch.”
The power of the painting lay in the fact that even the reclining nude made it clear she wasn’t resting. Something intangible disturbed her, kept her from relaxing, from sleeping. The angles of her thighs and legs bordered on impossible. It was hard to imagine anyone would want to push their body to that extreme while at rest. You would expect serenity in a reclining pose, but here, as inStorm, it was movement within the pose that dominated.
“The model is dozing, but moving,” I told Lily when I first saw it. Her sex was painted in bold red. In nearly every work where Lily depicted the female sex in color, it was red that stood out.
Back then, I could never have imagined that this very color, in precisely the way it appeared on the canvas, would later dominate one of the most dramatic events of her life – of our lives. Like a nightmare coming true.
“Are you happy with your choice?”
“You know how indecision drives me crazy – and competition, even more so.”
“So are you now satisfied?”
“I am now, and I’m calm.”
“And what do you call this one?” she asked, waiting for my verdict.
“Slumber in Motion!” I smiled as she embraced me.
On the day the works were to be hung in the museum, Lily roamed the gallery restlessly. The place buzzed with excitement. I was deeply impressed by the mutual encouragement among the seniors, even though it was a competition and everyone wanted to win.
“That’s not something to take for granted,” I told her.
I hadn’t experienced that kind of camaraderie amongclassmates at med school. More than once, someone seeking to stand out would slice through a peer’s words with the sharpness of a razor. Predators, I called them. Here at the museum, it was different – so much so that I felt a pang of envy.
Lily seemed to have fit in well with her classmates at Avni during the single year she studied there. True, her beauty made her stand out, and she was surrounded by young artists eager to help her. But the others, too, looked just like her – handsome, radiant, excited.
We arrived at the opening with her family. The excitement was at its peak. The museum was crowded, and it was impossible to know which of them represented the Sharett Foundation.
About a month later, when we were already in Eilat, Lily’s mother called.
