Read Online An Emergence of Green by Katherine V Forrest - Free Book Online

the ruffle-edged leaves? And this lovely yellow is a woolly marigold. And this is desert sienna.”
    “It’s wonderful. It’s a wonderful, wonderful painting.” She could think of nothing more to say.
    “Thank you. It does need more work but it’s almost there. The yellows come forward too much, the blues need to be brought up a bit. Now I’ll show you a real change of pace—from an artist who ordinarily loves bright color.” Val came out of her tiny makeshift bedroom with a painting perhaps five feet long and three feet high, and propped it against the box.
    A succession of gray tones lay across the canvas, beginning at the top with deep gray which was not opaque but seemed somehow impenetrable, and dissolving into successive bands of lighter grays which became a pearl mist that ended abruptly at bold gray-black brush strokes of solid squarish shapes. Thin needles of color knifed down through the gray bands, into the gray-black, the needles of silver, blue, blue-purple.
    Carolyn stepped closer to the painting, needing to shut out her surroundings, and in the stifling heat of Val’s house rubbed a sudden chill from her bare arms. “I don’t know the first thing about art,” she finally said. “All I can tell you is I truly love this.”
    “What is there about it that touches you? Can you tell me?”
    “I don’t know…” Looking at the painting, searching for words, Carolyn answered slowly, “The peaceful quality…the way the grays combine. It makes me feel mellow. Like I do on rainy days.”
    Val’s smile was intense with pleasure. “You do know about art. Rain—our rain, Los Angeles rain—was exactly what I was trying to convey. The distinctive way it rains here, how it doesn’t cloud up but grays over, darker and darker, then lightens and rains.”
    She indicated the gray-black shapes at the bottom of the painting. “This is the horizon line with the suggestion of our endless, mostly flat city. Susan likes this one but won’t take it, it’s too much of a departure to hang with my other work.” Val chuckled. “She’s hoping I haven’t gone into what she calls a gray, uncommercial phase. She’s not enthusiastic about a series of paintings I’m working on at the beach house either, but—”
    “Beach house?”
    “Her parents have a small place in Malibu. In exchange for checking things out every week while they’re in Europe, Neal gets to play volleyball on the beach and I get to work on a series of ocean paintings.”
    “Seascapes? How wonderful.”
    “No, not seascapes,” Val said with a grin. “Sorry to disappoint you. Better talents than mine have tried to capture the ocean. I don’t think anyone has—at least not enough of it. I’m painting the effects of ocean—surfaces of rocks, the scouring of high tide, things like that.”
    Carolyn was staring at the painting. She asked impulsively, “How much do you charge for your work?”
    “It’s negotiable, like all art. Whatever the traffic will bear and depending on Susan’s opinion, and the size of the canvas. Most of my work is fairly good size and Susan asks in the four to six hundred dollar range, before gallery commission.”
    Carolyn closed her eyes for a moment. She said recklessly, “I want this one. I want to buy it. I love it. I want to own it.”
    “It’s yours then. But I won’t sell it to you.”
    “What? I want to buy it. You know I can afford it; you can’t just give your work away—”
    “Of course I can. I can do anything I want with my work. And I refuse to be any more in debt to you than I already am. I’ve been using your pool for months. Your air conditioner is a lifesaver, it’s making it possible for me to work better and longer.”
    Carolyn sighed. This was crazy. “Anything I’ve given you isn’t that much and isn’t important to me at all.”
    She continued to argue, but Val parried her points with good-humored grins and shakes of her head. “All right,” Carolyn conceded. “Can you