Master of Pixels by Katherine Boyes

It’s Sunday morning. Most cafes are already open at ten o’clock, and a few shops along the main street of the small rural town I live in now. A recent move to care for an elderly parent has been good so far. The people in this town are colourful, arty, friendly and a lovely change from the outback dust and tumbleweeds I just moved from.
A new, big-name art gallery is open on the outskirts of town somewhere, but I’m not sure where. Someone in the tourist centre on the corner must know. I stop and park. Up the ramp and into the gift shop stuffed and overflowing with local craft and titbits, I try to find the counter buried beneath piles of books, soaps, calendars and honey. A smiling, loudly-spoken woman takes me outside and points to a big, green sign across the road that points to the new gallery. Its name is sprawled across in large letters. Oh, duh, I feel. She invites me to take a look around their smaller, but well-known gallery inside. I oblige.
I walk into a large room with a zigzagging ramp going back and forth, descending across the room until it reaches a door at the opposite wall. Around the four walls is a large mural of the local landscape viewed from the highest lookout in the area. It’s a three hundred and sixty-degree view with everything in perfect perspective from the top of Mount Nebo. The view is on a series of panels that blend seamlessly. The ramp moves me further down each wall until I’m facing some brightly coloured parrots painted into the foreground for effect. A few waratahs and wattle flowers are next to those for authenticity, if we need it. I puzzle over the ramp. Perhaps it simulates a mountain walk. It only frustrates me because I can’t read the labels of the mountains on the horizons.
The ramp shuttles me out into a lower level. It’s a hall divided by six-foot temporary walls lined with paintings. I peruse the rows. A local photographer is on show. Farm sheds in any state of dilapidation are his passion. Behind another counter is a type of studio. An easel stands highlighted by a sunbeam streaming through an upper window of the hall.
“Can you see that?”
“What?” I say.
“The light in my painting. Look!”
I take a closer look at the landscape on the easel. It’s another view of Mount Nebo. The front face is a sheer rock cliff. The sunbeam is hitting the back of the painting and highlighting the pale colours of the picture so that it looks three-dimensional. The shadows are darkest dark while the light bounces off the foremost points.
“Wow. Did you do that?” I say.
“Yes, I did. It’s a sunrise view.”
“That’s how a painting should look, with all the light standing out like that,” I say.
“That’s what I’ve done.”
“Oh, yes, I see that. It’s very good. But you should make a light box to frame it on to bring out those highlights more Otherwise, it’s really flat,” I say.
“Err, I don’t know. I’ll think about it. Maybe.”
“What causes that effect? I’ve never seen it before,” I say.
The painting is held up higher, toward the sunbeam and we squint at it closely.
“Must be the pigment. It’s thinnest in the lighter colours.”
“You have a very unusual technique for oil painting. Usually, oils begin with dark areas and the paint is built up to the lighter ones, where the pigment is thickest. Only watercolours have the least pigment in lighter areas,” I say.
“Uh, yeah. I don’t know.”
“That is an oil, right?” I say.
“Yes, it is. It must be the sunlight hitting it at the right moment, just as you walked in. I’m the resident artist, by the way. Would you like a guided tour of the gallery?”
I am shown the local talent.
“This is mine, and this one, and that one over there.”
The paintings are all ultra-realistic landscapes. I marvel at the amount of detail in them and the accurate scale of perspective. They are two thousand dollars each.
“I shape the brushes for the treetops. That’s my secret. It makes all that daubing a lot easier, otherwise I’d go mad.”
I nod in agreement and take a closer look at the daubs on the canvas.
“How do you get the colours and tone in such a perfect gradient at each level of distance on such a large scale?”
A bottom drawer opens, filled with rows of small plastic jars with graded tones of every colour in each painting. It reminds me of the paint-by-numbers kit given to my sister for Christmas as a kid. The drawer closes and I am ushered through the maze of makeshift walls again.
“With a bit more red here to counteract all the green this would be amazing, don’t you think?”
“Well, yes, it’s already pretty amazing. But there is a lot of green,” I say, staring at the untouched depths of a luscious rainforest.
“Yes, but it’s all about balancing the eye, isn’t it?”
“Complimentary colours, yes, they work,” I say.
“You’re welcome to come to our classes on Saturday mornings. There are many very talented artists in it. Here are the tuition fees and hours.”
A brochure is handed to me. Costs are reasonable. The talent is phenomenal.
“The classes are very informal. There are a lot of young girls, some men, some older women. This artist is a young eighteen-year-old. Very talented.”
The painting is a realistic waterfall and pond with rocks and pebbles I could hold in my hand.
“Yes,” I say. “Do you teach watercolours?”
“I can do that. Why don’t you come and have lunch with me tomorrow? We can talk more about it then.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Lovely. Here’s a book that I absolutely love by an artist I really admire. You can borrow it for a while.”
Inside a cabinet, piles of art books haphazardly lean towards a future tumble waiting to happen. A softcover is slipped from underneath the pile with a magician’s flair. I flip through the pages.
“I love it. I’ll bring it back in a few weeks when I’ve read it,” I say.
“And lunch?”
“I’ll meet you here tomorrow at noon,” I say.
“Okay, see you then.”
I walk back up the ramp in the scenic room, out the front door and down the ramp to the carpark. The big, gallery sign across the road beckons. “Just friends,” I think, putting the car into drive.
The next day, I’m met in the carpark as I get out of the car.
“We’re going to the mountains, to my friend’s resort. She wants me to give some advice on how to arrange her gallery.”
We drive for two hours, up meandering hairpins and high plateaus, through bush to a guest house perched on the side of a sheer cliff.
“I sold a pot-boiler so I’ll buy you lunch.”
We have English tea and spiced cake. The view is fantastic, looking out over the valley, dam, and towards the crowded coast. On the way out of the dining room, I notice a very large triptych hanging in the corner. I recognize the artist immediately.
“Is that yours?” I say.
“No, that’s a photograph I took of the view from this window.”
I walk over to the canvas and peer at it closely. The leaves are pixelated and the colours wrap around the edges of the canvas, as if dripping, stretching across the sides of it. It’s a photo printed onto canvas.
“I get them done in China for ten bucks each.”
I nod, thoughtfully.
“It looks just like your paintings: same style, same views, same colours, same aspect,” I say.
There are some more by the front door. Rosellas, bright reds and greens. The resort owner buys them both, right on the spot. She’s had her eye on them for a while. Three hundred dollars each.
We drive back in the dark. It’s May and getting colder.
“Get out of the way, jackass.”
“Get off the road.”
“Look, where some poor bugger’s Kawasaki hit the dust.” A floral cross marks the spot.
“You know, there is nothing stopping anyone from just driving onto the wrong side of the road and hitting any other driver. We all trust too much.”
The car swerves sharply onto the other side of the road, then back again, and over again.
Body odour from old, unwashed shirts fills the car as the heater pumps out hot air.
I breathe a sigh of relief as the car door opens and I slip out into the dark of the carpark and over to the safety of my clean, warm car. “Never again,” I think.