«…They say, every time an artist dies, God lets them paint the sky that night to say goodbye.
Jensen didn't believe in God. He lived in tiny cheap apartments in the outskirts of Stillwater, Minnesota, and in the morning instead of hot coffee's flavor he breathed in turpentine. I often asked him why did he spend all his hard-earned money on the new paints, remover and canvas, and not the food and clothes, but Jensen would never really answer. He would just, you know, shrug and give me a guilty smile.
I'm starting to understand now: he just couldn't do otherwise. Because how can you try to feed yourself with bread, when there's another hunger to be appeased – absorbing, scratching inside, unceasing?
There were not enough emotions for Jensen. He never tried to leave Stillwater though, but all these 7 thousand people, fussy narrow red-brick houses, small cafeterias under the white umbrellas and art galleries dropped here and there just were not enough for him. Jensen was looking for himself on the Stillwater's night streets, near the bridge, in the dark green parks and under the street lights.
I visited him every two months and I saw his vain efforts to paint the real picture.
"I don't have enough paints to draw what I want to," Jensen said as he threw the brushes angrily in the corner and covered the untouched canvas with the old newspaper (I guess, it was The SW Chronicles). Then I could barely help smiling, looking at his grumpy face, and offered him a walk around the night town. Just to hang out, drink a cup of tea (which I always paid for, never really listening to his strong protests). Somehow it actually helped, and that night inspired Jensen started to paint another picture under the moonlight. But it could cheer him up only for a couple of days.
"I can't find a right shade," he complained to me, for a hundred time mixing paints and with the clever, sharp move stroking it on the canvas. I had nothing to say, because I saw that all of his paintings were good. Both ones that had been already sold and ones have not been painted yet.
"I need more space, " said Jensen next time I visited him, and we started to rake the stuff out of the corners together, throwing away old newspapers (it's The SW Chronicles again) and crannied canvas with the faded long time ago colors from the closet.
Jensen needed more space, more emotions to express it in his pictures, he needed more paints. For days and nights easel was staying in the middle of his room while Jensen nestled on a mattress near one of the threadbare walls, filled with photos and newspapers' clippings.
He needed more than he saw.
As days went by, more people were walking down the streets of Stillwater, and Jensen more often stayed at night on the pier, gazing into the darkness and looking for the new colors.
He would send me letters, when it turned out well for him to get a couple of extra dollars from selling his pictures. In it he would wrote that he doesn't regret about his life, but he knows that he doesn't have too much of it anymore, because he has already kept in his mind and reproduced on canvas every leaf in park, every stone in a causeway, every white umbrella and bridge of Stillwater.
I visited him and Jensen smiled with his eternally guilty smile and shrugged when I asked him strict questions. I saw him slimmed down, but didn't say anything, because it didn't mean anything for Jensen at all.
"You know me, " he said, and his eyes would cast beyond the window where the autumm sun was hiding behind the grey clouds, "a brush and a palette are the only things that matter. Every single person wants to paint something. Sometimes it's themselves, sometimes it's someone, and the rest are painting pictures. "
"And what do you want to paint? " I've asked him, hoping secretly that Jensen has already found an answer for his question.
But no, he hasn't, and we parted ways again.
Last summer I got two letters from him with the familiar scent of turpentine. In the first one he wrote that I shouldn't visit him anymore and that he had sold out his easel and brushes. He said this is how it would be better, because now another artist could try his luck and search for his true painting. And with the second letter he sent his last work wrapped in old newspapers: there was a bridge painted as dozen of black spears, blue and orange water in which sky was reflecting, cut with scarlet strokes and heavy dark-grey clouds, and a brush dropped in a malachite green grass on the foreground.
Jensen died in two weeks after this. I still don't know how he managed to stay for so long and why he refused to paint pictures in his last days, but I try to think he saw something there. In the darkness. Something gave him a clue.
I regret so much I wasn't with him in that moment. His last picture is now hanged on my wall as the reminder of this thought that sometimes canvas just isn't enough to express our feelings.
I came to Stillwater this autumn to look for something I could keep in Jensen's memory. And you, people in this town, haven't noticed that, of course, but other street artists told me that the sky was unusually bright and colorful the next day after Jensen died. They described its impassive but baking sun, fiery but grumpy dawn, sharp blue clouds and sky high filled with thousands of shades. They showed me beautiful pictures they drew that day. There was a sky that nobody has ever seen above Stillwater before.
One of these masters of brush (the one like Jensen was) told me that every time an artist dies, God lets them paint the sky that night to say goodbye.
Jensen didn't believe in God, I know, but I think he finally found the canvas which had enough space for him. And paints that managed to show all his emotions. »
The SW Chronicles,
Unknown Author, 22 November 1987.