What the artist drew

The artist set up in the park at the top of the hill with no easel, just a sketchbook, some pencils, and pens to go over really outstanding lines. The park was waterfront, grassy, with old fashioned street lamps and lots of kids playing, dog walkers. Small sailboats meandered on the water that went straight out to sea. The artist had a baseball cap on, but flipped it backwards now because the shadow of the brim kept falling across the paper. After staring for a while, turning and looking up, down, taking it in, sipping something from a canteen, the artist set to work. In twenty minutes, a pulse, a zone, had been found, and the whole scene of movements, kids playing dogs walking boats sailing, was one jello-like solid, one scene of motion all around the artist who was making lines and lines and lines.

The artist kept looking up, off to the ocean. Kept studying the fine shadows and curves of the leaves and the grass, the particular turn of a child's cheek. Tried looking at what inquisitive dogs were seeking out, nose to ground, and the artist kept looking up and kept going back to the sketchbook now to erase or to add, to smudge with a tongue-moistened finger and then hold out, look at with head slightly tilted. Once the artist turned to the next sheet and started fresh. The children down the hill sounded distant, the way people at the swimming pool do just as sleep begins to arrive, from a lounge chair.

For two hours, the artist worked and looked, finally getting out some colors – but that only lasted a minute; they didn't seem to be working out right. A woman reading on a nearby bench was so curious, kept looking up over her pages trying to watch what the artist drew, but couldn't quite see well enough, was not aware that the book had moved to her lap and she was just staring. And still the artist drew.

A cloud passed overhead, the temperature dropped a few degrees. The artist had a sweater on the grass, but didn't make a move for it. Turned the baseball cap to front facing. Did not know the woman was watching from behind, and finally, all at once, as an apparently spontaneous decision with the pencil barely lifted from the page and not an extra moment of contemplation, the artist packed everything up, checked the time, and walked off up the hill.

Most of the sailboats were turning in and the cries of the children showed some tiredness, hunger, laced over happiness from an afternoon outdoors. The woman on the bench kept reading, but now the breeze was a little too cold, the shadows a little too distracting on the page, and she'd get to the end and realize she had only been thinking about what she saw on the artist's page -- surely it wasn't what she thought she saw, was it? -- but she couldn't really know, might never know for sure. It was probably time to go home, make something to eat.

The woman went home, made something to eat. Took a shower and poured some wine, ready to try the book again, now from the couch in the lamplight. But instead she only opened the page and saw the park. So she hesitated, grabbed a sheet of blank paper (which took her a moment to find, for all the paper she had in the apartment, none seemed to be blank) and picked up a pencil with determination, poised to make a mark and stopped. Looked up. Only the clock was ticking, and beside her, that same ocean was visible through the glass leading to her balcony. She looked out into the sea beyond the town and could see quite a bit of the waves, the sleeping sailboats, in the moonlight. And she squinted her eyes, tried to look out as far as she could but the never-ending lapping blackness of the sky and the water only melted out and away. She stood and pressed her nose to the glass (too chilly, it had become, to stand out on the balcony) and she tried to see farther. Tried to see the sea.

Finally she turned around and picked her book back up. Stopped every once in a while to look at the blank paper and the pencil, thinking of the blackness and everything that could be, out there, and she was certain of what the artist must have been drawing.