It was my own portrait: naked, bare, exposed.
A darker shade of rich maroon, rivaled by daubs of Prussian blue, swathed me in shadows and an imposing solitude, more pronounced in the presence of many who stood a few steps away on the left side of the canvas, bright and blithe, basking in the rising sun.
My body was daringly placed in the foreground. Tall. So tall the head was partially cropped by the horizontal rim of the ornate golden frame. Every single layer of my battered skin was masterfully construed through swift layered touches of the brush—mint green, butterscotch yellow, bone white.
In the background, a hazy phantasmagoric impression of a church and its magnificent domes and turrets were mirrored on the flickering glad waters of the canal. They imbued almost half of the primed cloth, leaving the sky only a struggling imitation of the glorious sea that rippled and stirred by the momentary flare of the sun-tanned figures in the cool breeze, in shades of purple, blue, and green.
A scene only befitting celestial glory! Yet there I was, rubbing shoulders with the sun god, however defeated, scared, distraught, and disturbed…There I was at the end of my rope; ready to bend, to give way, to break… but somehow, I couldn’t.
My feet were tethered to my absinth green reflection by a patch of cadmium yellow—a creeping golden shaft of light, bracing me up, grasping me still, arresting me to a moment so familiar, so real, so palpable, that I knew without a vestige of doubt, that if only I let go of that long breath hitched in my chest, the sun would instantly rise, higher and higher in a blink of an eye. Strong, bedazzling, proud.
And there will be light no matter what… that soon, I too, will be dressed in a shining armor of sunlight...that the darkest hour always kowtows at the feet of dawn… that I’ll be redeemed and rendered free.
That moment was there… and that advent of hope was my own portrait.
Out of the corner of my sparkling moist eyes, a small transparent label next to the canvas brandishing its inscription in midnight black thus read:
Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926)
The Grand Canal, Venice, 1908
Oil on Canvas
