The Studio
Jason Berger, The Studio, Brookline, 1973
The palette down left in the foreground,
quickly sketched, diaphanous,
a white outline across black lines
on red and yellow overpainting—
thumbhole like the eyehole of a Cyclops skull.
What is it but the mind as objects enter it?
The brushstroke of the forearm notch,
itself a letting through,
rips round with something like sheer joy.
The painter painted here,
and as it turns out more than once,
a former painting coming toward us,
pinkish red along the painting’s
bottom edge—a less-than-stable ground
beneath the roughly painted floor.
The past one can’t help standing on.
Up center where the painting concentrates,
a gray-blue tabletop that slants up right
in opposition to its single leg
supports the jars and paint brushes
suspended in the present tense.
The medium that shuttles back and forth
between the eye and all its reaches
and the reaches of the mind.
The black brush handles lean toward linear
brown stems and yellow-green and darker leaves,
white flowers, a thick, brown, standing book,
and something dripping gray
on something like a crosswise plank.
Two vertical sash windows, blind
to what’s to come—of what’s outside the windows
nothing shows—enlarge the studio.
Glass parchment over blue
in strokes that glaze one window’s middle rail
and gray blue like the tabletop
that lies in part inside a picture frame
that leans against the table empty—
both sides trailing off below
into the painting’s interstitial ground.
The walls themselves are blue—sky blue
and streaked white like the window panes—
the table’s shadow black and gray,
the floor gray blue on beige and misaligned,
the jaunty dark-blue T of table leg
and tabletop extending past the frame
to other T’s, t’s lowercase, or x’s;
the trestle salmon-colored plantstand standing
where the table’s righthand leg does not—
toward which cascade more stems and leaves—
a solid, dark-brown folding bench down right.
It isn’t like it’s raining. Light enough
intensifies the red jar and the black
brush handles and the cobalt stripe
across the fleshy nearer jar.
Nor is it clear and sunny skies. The paint
laid on all round in one-off strokes,
like strokes of something more than luck
and less than genius—of a medium
that’s all there ever is outside
the notch and eyehole of the palette-skull.
