A Brush With Ombeline

The paintbrush stood in the pot, its sable bristles sad and dry. It had been weeks since it had been pressed into service. All remnants of warmth and every blurred fingerprint had evaporated.

Ombeline had coated her hands in thick wet green and was adding erotic swirls to her canvas. There was something organic, and tactile, and visionary about getting one's hands dirty, and Ombeline's pleasure was sensual as well as aesthetic. She had developed a recent liking for eating with her fingers, too, ignoring the conventions of cutlery. This was not difficult, as she ate mainly bread and blue cheese. Eliminate the tools of the trade, she had decided. Use your hands.

The paintbrush had given sound and solid service to Ombeline, its dry sable flag remembering dirty whites, false blacks and worlds of grey. Colour, too. Yellow was an itchy colour, and fortunately Ombeline had not used it often because she believed it to be vulgar, literal and without politics. Yellow was used in conjunction with blue to make green, and the creamy texture of all shades of blue was a salve to the itch of its yellow husband. Green was cool. Red, a colour favoured by Ombeline, had an exciting tingle; when mixed with the salvation of blue, the resulting purple had almost hurt. These connections were of the past. Sensations of colour and tone had fled the paintbrush and been replaced by the textures of air.

That lone, potted paintbrush had a history, having been implicated in many of Ombeline's seminal works. Against the wall, directly opposite, leaned Small Potatoes, the world's first Cubist painting. Fine strokes of the brush were discernable through the greys and browns of the subject matter and two of its bristles were forever trapped in the background. Alongside this piece stood The Primary Hysteria of Clowns, executed in a style Ombeline was still developing and which she would eventually call Abstract Expressionism. In this piece, the brushstrokes served as punctuation marks. And on the wall above hung Le Lavoir de Carrières-sur-Seine, a blurry and atmospheric depiction of the laundrette in her home town. This painting, in which the brush's traces were largely invisible, had left such a bad impression on viewers that Ombeline had called the style Impressionism.

But Ombeline had abandoned the brush and taken a hands-on approach to her painting. It was the second decade of the Twentieth Century, after all. It was necessary to develop new art for the new epoch, and to create such art in new ways, without primitive tools, like paintbrushes.

Ombeline was creating a vast field of green, sown and ploughed with ten fingers. She stood back to look, squinting for perspective, and wiped her greenish hands on her apron. The bold and broad sweeps of colour, as applied manually to the canvas, had a succulent texture. She looked at her dry hands, olive and cracking, and knew that she needed to apply some vulgar yellow to her field. She turned to the sink to wash her hands, and in doing so, knocked over a pot.

The pot fell to the floor and smashed dramatically. Its contents, the lone brush, flew from the carnage and made a crash landing by Ombeline's left boot. It lay there pathetically. It was no longer a necessary item to Ombeline, but now that it was no longer forgotten, it was in danger. The sad sable bristles drew themselves shut, like petals in oncoming darkness.

"Yes!" said Ombeline to herself. Though thoroughly sane, Ombeline often talked to herself. She looked at the pattern on the stone floor created by the shards of pottery that were no longer a pot, and said, "How perfect. How perfect!"

Ombeline carefully lifted the largest curl of clay and held it up against her handmade field of green. The grubby burgundy of the fragment and its rough, unglazed underbelly made a gorgeous contrast with the green of the field. Ombeline smiled. She knew where she could acquire the right glue. She would glue the pieces of broken pot onto her canvas in the same shape that had been made when the pot had fallen and smashed on the floor. No sacrifice - the pot had given itself to her art. The finished piece would make, for any inferential viewer, a neat representation of archaeology. That, or a comment on the beauties of recycling.

Ombeline looked meaningfully at the pattern of smashed pot on the stone floor, and mentally photographed it. It was perfect, except for the paintbrush that lay trembling to one side.

"Where did you come from?" she asked, lifting the poor object from the floor. It was a rhetorical question. "Look at you. Old and dried up, no use to anybody."

Ombeline twirled the little paintbrush in her green fingers. The brush had a sense of the warmth of Ombeline's hand, but the warmth was yellow, and remained abstract. She took the brush and held it over the galvinised steel bucket containing a fortnight of artist's trash, and she dropped it in amongst wads of paper and their comforting odour of turpentine.

But then, on impulse, she snatched it up again, gave its worn wooden handle a kiss and ruffled its bristles with her dry green thumb.

"You can go in here, " she said. And she dropped the paintbrush into the drawer with the knives and forks, and she slid the drawer firmly shut.


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