Paintbox

A multiplicity of memories on worn thin tissue, overlaid and frayed and torn around the edges, piled one on one, together building a layered grid of coloured squares, indistinct and hazy-edged. Jam jar of still-bubbled water, maroon painted handle sharp flaking under fingernails, sable bristles cruelly bent.

Square tin, a paintbox grid, each rectangle of colour named beneath, named and become a character, permeated by pigment, assembled into tales more vivid than any picture I can paint on cheap and bleeding paper which never fails to stain the page beneath. Rose Madder, inescapably the heroine, long before I heard of Tara, and Prokofiev- inspired Lieutenant Kijé: blue-uniformed, his cheekbones Prussian, jingling sleigh bells echoing across the snow. The villains: predatory Hookers Green (years before I heard of whores) or cowardly and caddish Cadmium yellow, headed for a Crimson lake. Siennas, Burnt and Earth, and Ochre – the names beloved but colours then thought oh so dull, create a castled landscape.