Cynthia doesn’t have a word for what happens. She thinks of it as ‘drifting off’, but knows that isn’t an adequate description. She has never had to put it into words for anyone else. She might have to if it ever happened while she was in the middle of speaking to someone, or travelling on the Underground, or having sex. If it happened where people might notice and wonder what was going on. But it only ever happens when she is alone in her studio, working.
It starts with a sense she is not fully in control of what she is doing. She can still feel her limbs, the texture of the paintbrush under her fingertips, but this seems disengaged from her brain, as she had flicked a switch to make the movement happen automatically. It’s like the arm on the record player she keeps on the studio floor: lifting itself up, moving across, and dropping at the start of the record.
But the longer it goes on, the less aware she is of her actions and the room, and she starts to see another place superimposed on her vision, like a double exposure on a photograph. (At college she experimented with deliberate double exposures, and enjoyed the unpredictability of the results, but found it limited as a technique.) The other place she sees is always the same: a beach, not somewhere hot. On first seeing the beach she assumed it was in Britain, but only because there was nothing to suggest otherwise. She could see a few houses further up the coast that looked like the kind of houses you see in Britain, but for all she knows the coast of Norway, or Canada, or the USSR, looks like this. She has never left the country of her birth, so how would she know?
The second time she saw the beach, she found herself walking. She passed a couple who broke off from their conversation to wish her a good day, and from their accents she gathered the beach is somewhere in the north of England. And judging from their clothing – and her own, when she looks down at herself – it’s maybe the mid-Victorian era. Since then she has seen other people confirming this impression, but Cynthia doesn’t know enough about the period to be able to pin it down. It’s tempting to think it’s exactly a hundred years ago, because that seems neat and satisfying, but she really doesn’t know.
The longer each of these spells goes on, the clearer the beach becomes in her senses. Her studio fades out almost completely, and she can only see the outline of her canvas if she makes an effort to do so. The person through whose eyes she sees the beach is not herself, but another woman – a slightly shorter, slightly plumper, slightly older woman, who looks to be in her 30s. She wears long dresses and plenty of layers, leaving Cynthia feeling swaddled compared with the loose shirts she wears when painting.
When the beach is at its most vivid, Cynthia feels in control of her movements there. She can walk to the shoreline, look in the water and see the pale face and piercing eyes looking back at her. It is odd and uncomfortable to be walking around in a stranger’s body, every part of it moving a little differently than she’s used to, the heavy clothes making her even more aware of its more rounded shape. She is sometimes gripped by worry that her studio will fade out completely and she will become this other woman permanently, cut off from a life she has worked hard to attain: but when the beach fades, it does so quickly. She feels disorientated for a moment, and then she examines the progress she has made with her work while her mind was elsewhere.
There are always plenty of new marks on the canvas when she sees it again, and never ones she was intending to make. There will be odd figures in the background, or colours she hadn’t thought of using. She doesn’t know where these ideas come from, but she incorporates them into the piece. She enjoys their randomness. It’s like the double exposures, but stranger and richer.
At the moment Cynthia is working on a new collection. She takes pictures of shop signs whenever they strike her, and she reproduces them on large canvases, changing the colour palette as she sees fit, cutting out parts of the words to render them less intelligible, thereby focusing the viewer’s attention on the formal qualities of the lettering. At the moment she is painting the words TAYLORS TAXIS in narrow, dynamic italics, and has cut off about a quarter of the letters at the top. The real sign, which she saw while visiting a friend in Acton, is white and has lights behind it so it stands out at night. Cynthia has painted the background in luminous yellow to create a similar eyecatching effect. The real letters are black, but she has decided to render some of them in purple and some in bright red.
This canvas is almost complete when Cynthia feels herself drifting. The beach comes into her vision, and it’s a fresh, sunny morning. She is walking. She feels the bracing sea air on her tongue and throat. In the studio her hand is adding bolder strokes of purple to the X: she wants it to stand out slightly more than the rest of the painting. But her attention is distracted by the bright sunlight on the beach, which is shining on starfish that have washed up on the shore. There seem to be dozens, maybe hundreds. She crouches down to examine them: they are not the chunky ones she usually imagines, but have long, slender arms covered in fronds.
She stays there, looking at them, for quite some time. Today she wears a gold-yellow dress and has a black cloak around her shoulders, which is nicer than some of the outfits she’s found herself in. It feels pleasant to be here.
When the studio reasserts itself in her vision, there are new lines all across the TAYLORS TAXIS canvas. Rounded five-pointed shapes with curling arms emerging from the gaps between the points. They are scattered across the clean angles of the letters, obscuring parts of them. They are unmistakably the starfish from the beach.
Cynthia stands and walks over to her record player, turns over the Nina Simone album she was listening to, and then sits back down and starts to fill in the lines with more detail. She has a good memory of the starfish, and decides to depict them as accurately as she is able.
Across the weeks that follow, she paints more signs, and each time she drifts away, she finds she has again painted the starfish over the canvas she is working on. She doesn’t understand what it means, but she likes the effect a great deal.
She exhibits the finished paintings at a small gallery in St John’s Wood. She hangs them and thinks they look good together. They starfish make the collection feel more unified in a way she hadn’t expected, like the signs are being claimed by the sea. She goes to the opening and stands awkwardly, holding a glass of wine, in the centre of the room, because that’s the only place where she isn’t in the way.
What made you paint these? a guest inevitably asks.
Cynthia decides to be honest, because she can’t think what else to say. She talks about her unbidden vision of the beach and the starfish and coming back to find she had painted them. She doubts anyone will believe it, but it’s more interesting than talking about how she sees the world as a woman. The pop art scene is full of men, and she hates being seen as an amusing novelty. She tells her story a few times to different people, and a journalist writes it down. It’s hard to know what people really think of her paintings – no-one ever seems to display too much enthusiasm at these things – but they are not showing outright contempt, at least.
The gallery is quite busy, and one painting has been sold, when the starfish begin to pulse with light. It is subtle at first, but it catches the eye. You could easily convince yourself you were imagining it, but the light grows, and grows, swirls of neon orange cutting across your vision. The assembled guests chatter amongst themselves, a mix of confusion and interest. Cynthia, still standing in the middle, turns and looks at each of her works in turn as they glow insistently at her.
The pulsing becomes a steady, burning light, which sustains for several seconds. Then abruptly it fizzles out, and the starfish disintegrate. The part of each canvas where they were turns to ash and falls to the floor, leaving a starfish-shaped hole in each one.
The guests look to Cynthia, and she just smiles knowingly as if she expected it to happen.
In the next five minutes, the rest of the paintings all sell. As the opening winds down, people tell Cynthia they are looking forward to what she does next. She thanks them as if she has something in mind which she will reveal in due course. But she doesn’t know how she did what she has done tonight, or if she can possibly do anything like it again.
Thanks for your 52 stories which have all been fascinating in their own way.