4 GABRIELLE Success! Down there and drawing by 12:30 and tackled that center portal. There are those times that it all just draws itself– you don’t hurt anywhere, you can see, you don’t need anything, the pen is right, the paper’s right, and blessed concentration. Spent five hours and got to this point:
I fell in love with the way the brick has eroded between those portals. With a little more work, it’ll be clearer, how fountains of water have washed down the surface of that brick in thousands of storms. Now as you can see, if I don’t start pulling back right away on the detail, the whole thing will be one busy texture and all the structure and drama lost. So next, it’s concentrate on the dark arches above these portals. And I’ll have to sacrifice. The inside areas may have to get a whole lot darker.
Gabrielle called. I like this girl. She read yesterdays’ note, and asked me if I’d like some time to myself first. So I had awhile in the zone, and then after she showed up, companionable work silence broken by grunts and the occasional profanity. She showed up in shorts, which made me yell at her, but quickly produced a large shawl and wrapped it around ’em. We made a pact to concentrate and natter later. Her ink-wash is coming along very well, but it was dicey there for awhile. Even so, her marble is hard, her brick is old, the structure has weight and strength, no mean feat with ink-wash, one of the most difficult mediums.A couple of the bums were down there, the affable one and a new one, who sat and drank his beer and stared over hungrily. Finally he came over and, touchingly shy, asked to see the work, made some conversation, wandered away. The guy off in the corner is still there from yesterday, eating, drinking and reading his newspaper. He never moves, he’s like a projection.
Around five-thirty my eyes were fine but I couldn’t sit anymore despite the cushion I haul down there every day. Coffee in the tea garden and then up the hill and over to the Corridor of Lord ruin under the carpet shop, which Garbrielle had never seen. More arches and domes, can’t get enough of ’em.
We went out with Huseyin for fish dinner in Kumkapi, had a fabulous time, stuffed ourselves with fish, Gypsy musicians banging the tambourine and whining on that violin right in my ear. It hurt like hell. But the working girls down there were so draw-able that I had to pull out the sketchbook. Never have I seen so many intriguing bodies in such tight spandex. The drum still stabbed but it didn’t hurt anymore, I was in the paper, and so were they. I’m falling asleep, I’m saving this as a draft, or not, it’s 2:45 AM and I didn’t do my exercises for the second day which means I’ll be flabby and die no doubt, but the hell with it, goodnight. A happy day.
