My Kid Could Paint That

Rosa Bonheur was arguably one of the main leaders in the romantic era of art. Bonheur received the majority of her training from her father, Raymond Bonheur. Saint Simonian also encouraged her artistic career and independence. At the young age of fourteen she started making copies at the Louvre in Paris. Her own works were greatly influenced as well as fascinated by trends in natural history including the theories of Etienne Goeggroy Saint-Hilaire. 

She kept a menagerie, frequented a slaughterhouse and dissected animals to gain a greater knowledge of their anatomy. Many of her works include exotic as well as non-exotic animals Bonheur attracted notice in 1845 from Theophile Thore's salon with her works: Goats and Sheep and Rabbits Nibbling Carrots, which won third prize. As a result of her success at this salon she was commissioned by the state to create Ploughing in the Nivernais. 

Bonheur brilliantly illustrates the rural landscape of the French province of Nivernais in central France. The piece is inspired by George Sand's novel, La Mare au Diable. The open space of the piece shows Bonheur's own longing for freedom in a world dominated by men. While the cattle ranchers (men) and cattle (women) themselves represent the view that women were meant to be subservient to men. The piece follows a strict linear composition meaning that the ideology of gender performance was viewed as unescapable. Bonheur paints a realistic rendering including vibrant blues in the sky, deep browns and beiges shown on the cattle and luscious greens in the grass. Bonheur’s stunning work portrays not only the beautiful landscape of rural France, but the social landscape lived by French women.

“Spectral”

I

Avella. Sometimes in toothpaste when drops crust up in the corners of my mouth. Sometimes on the olive-tip nose of a dog. Sometimes on the middle bits of fluorescent lights, where grey feigns silver before turning. Things never just are my color, like grass is green, like shit is brown. Things turn. Avella sparkles harder when I squint; then it burns. I dare you to strike a match and find the yellow. Only the yellow. Do you feel that oppressive blur, that sharpness like a migraine? It splinters your mind; here the yellow emerges, escapes, flickers in, flits out. This is how I meet my color-- like a memory of joy rendered traumatic by a harsher now. I cannot quite face avella for the pain.

Still I search for that hard shimmer in all things. I search in line behind the Kwik checkout counter, but first I examine the candies nestled together in boxes labeled 0.99!!. That's two exclamation points. Two breaths of ink wasted. I think about how stupid everyone is. Then I think my girl might like a Twix-- she’s at home with her friend Sadie-- but I hate the way she eats them. The wrappers drive me mad with their crinkling, which sounds shiny and pretty. There's nothing worse than trash trying to sound pretty.

I have to kneel to consider the Twix and when I stand again the back of someone's ropy ponytail hits me in the nose. I blink hard. There it is-- a flickering in her hair, northern lights cast along those gossamer strands. A sheen distant and vivid as the sun. Avella. Never before have I seen its diaphanous hues taint a human being. Plus this stranger (such a sexy word! stranger) is young and probably beautiful. I touch her shoulder.

She turns around. She is young. She is kind of beautiful.

“What,” says the woman.

“Nice hair.”

“Lots of men like my hair.”

She's at the machine now, pressing her fingertips against the glass. Her nails are crescent moons.

“I like your hair more,” I say. “It’s a color only I can see.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

She slides a box of Plan B beneath the scanning light. 

A guilty shiver scampers, uninvited, from the base of my neck up into my eyes, those half-burning sockets, and it is horrible, I mean it is horrible that nobody ever really knows anybody. I was feeling good, too. I'd taken a shower that morning.

She pays. There's that avella dancing up and down in electric bursts beneath her fat orange hair tie, which in comparison is ordinary to the point of repulsion.

Perhaps I should get the Twix.

By the time I've bought Advil for my headaches she's halfway out the door, ogling an assortment of flowers in the window. There's no wind but the petals shake. She does not look at me. She moves to let me by. She moves in silence.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Okay.”

She waits for me to leave.

“How are you,” I say.

...Now she is looking at me.

II [later]

More than a hug. My girl’s hands are all over my cheeks, the back of my neck. Little circles. She keeps dipping slightly beneath my shirt-- you know how they do it, try to lasso your entire ego with a few dextrous lashes of friction. But I am bigger than the world; like the sky I have no surface. Avella fireworks burst in the periphery of my vision, skirting the line between sleep and wakefulness, sanity and sheer madness. The ponytail is still there. It swings like a pendulum in the back of my mind. I damn near choked at the mercy of that brightness. Spiderweb threads, as they say, are stronger than steel.

“You didn’t get me any,” she says.

I emit some sort of sound. Raise the end to make a question.

“Any Twix.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Okay.”

A certain silence. Then my girl puts her hands in her lap and I become an itch forever unscratched, a wave felled too swiftly by the wind.

“Nick,” she says.

“Hm.”

“You aren’t here.”

“Hm?”

“You went somewhere new and you haven’t come back.”

I want to tell her. When we were dating in high school I’d tried to explain avella a million ways. It’s blue, but it’s not. It’s standing at the top of a mountain and looking out in every direction at once. It’s the prickly chill before a sneeze. It’s falling, I mean it’s flying, I mean it’s--!, I would say. My exes would tell her, It’s something he made up to feel special. Little rich boy in his cold marble castle. Nothing left to earn but love. Except I really saw it. Avella. Undeniable as dawn, skirting the edge of every cloud. And it was worse, maybe, that I saw it.

Here’s all I know about people: What we want is understanding. The only true permutation of love. But if that’s impossible--always, with kids-- we need to be needed. That’s not love; that’s survival. A lone self grows inadequate when rushed to stillness in the infinite onslaught of years. Women train themselves to like mystery for mystery’s sake.

But not my girl.

She asked me to find the avella in everything, stared at each quasi-empty spot with the desperately rapt yet evasive gaze of a sinner watching for God.

So it went, so it goes.

We are ordinary with each other. We know each other, almost. Still mystery lives; still deception lives; in myself; in you. I strike it and it lives. I await the fresh cracking of vertebrae, a snap like a gunshot, and all I get is a feeble blink. It lives. Deception is ambiguity, a hundred shadows leeched upon a light-boned face in a phantasmagoria of decay. And I cannot tell how much of this darkness is a remnant of deception’s own rot, that asphyxiated flesh turning to graphite-- or rather a product of the candle on its nightstand, which grows weak in the embrace of its own slime. Deception blinks and I throw her down again. The candle jumps in its metallic socket; the whole room rattles; her body makes no sound. Deception is dead. Mostly. She is dead and looking at me.

I am trying to hold my girl’s hands.

“Don’t be stupid,” I say. “I’m right here, I’m inches away.”

“There’s more than one kind of distance.”

She refuses to be touched.

This makes me angry.

“I met a girl,” I say. “I mean a woman.”

No response.

“We were in line at the checkout. Her hair was avella.”

More quiet. Then: “What did you do.”

I blink. “Don’t be stupid.”

“What did you do.”

“Two years and you still don’t trust me.”

“That’s not--”

I’m in her face now, grabbing her jaw with one hand. “You want to see the painkillers? Huh? Want me to save all my damn receipts? Is that what you want?”

She shakes her head and I can sense her teeth clenching up beneath her cheeks. “Sorrysorrysorry.” She clings to me once I let her go. In the sweet rush of skin I can breathe again. Now she pulls at my clothes; somehow this is the natural progression of things. I wonder, irrationally, whether I smell like flowers. “Find something avella,” she says as my thoughts start to unwind. I point out a tiny fissure in the ceiling.

When I look back she has taken her shirt off.

I squint.

It’s the light, I think. It has to be.

But I feel them, I feel them as I run my fingers across her collarbone, the moons, little crescent moons of red like stationery made for children, and they are slightly wet, and they are elegantly placed, and more, I see more now, along the softness of her stomach, her breasts--

“What’s this,” I say. My voice barely holds. “What’s this, sweetheart? Huh? What did you do?”

“What did I do?” She blinks. “Don’t be stupid.”

I cannot breathe.

She is smiling. There’s a noise outside, a honk, somebody’s car, and a dull ache pulls behind my eyes, and the whole room goes avella for a second, and then it is bland and hard, and she is still smiling.

Breathe, Nick.

In. Out.

“That’s Sadie,” she says. She slips her shirt back on.

In.

“Sadie’s car,” she says. She sits up straight.

Out.

“Sadie’s here.”

Rosa Bonheur was the most famous female realist artist. Her fame started in France where she grew up, but as her work changed, so did her popularity. The French female became more popular in Britain and America as her works lost their French touch. She was criticized for her English style and was pronounced a deserter. The Goncourt brothers insulted her by calling her “that Jewess,” showing the rise in Anti-Semitism in Europe. The original title of the painting is Sangliers dans la Neige, but I chose to stick with the English version Wild Boars in the Snow to show her shift from French popularity to English and American fame. Bonheur persevered and continued to paint with her muse. She painted all types of animals. She mostly focused on horses, cows, sheep, and other farm animals. Eventually, she expanded to exotic creatures like lions and wild boars. She studied the anatomy of the animals because accuracy was extremely important to her. Bonheur often went to butcher shops or zoos to watch and sketch animals before she started her final works. Due to her sometime-messy workspace, she started dressing like a man. She had to get a special permit to do so. Bonheur said her preferred clothing choice “was necessitated by her going to paint in the rough all-male atmosphere of the Paris slaughterhouses as Gericault had done.” Bonheur made sacrifices so she could paint as a passion and not as a job.

Out of all of her works, Wild Boars in the Snow caught my eye. It surprised me that the painting is about the size of the average piece of paper, and yet it contains many intricate details. I liked the color scheme and the warm glow given by the sunset, even though the snow would generally give a cold feeling. The warm colors seem to have an ombré effect that divides the painting in three parts horizontally: the snow, the forest and the sky. The pathways also seems to divide the painting vertically. The foremost boar seems to be the focal point and leader of the pack even though he is off-center. I think he is the focal point because the other boars blend in with the trees. He is also the first boar on the pathway, so he appears to lead the way. I do not feel that the painting has a religious, social or philosophical agenda. I think Bonheur just enjoyed painting animals, since they appear in most of her works.