Painting Beauty

By Naufal Ubaidillah

I woke up with an uplifted feeling that morning. The sleep was deep and dreamless. I felt well-rested. I went to a sitting position. Then I cleaned the corners of my eyes with my fingers. Thank God for another day, I said to myself. That day was January 3rd, 1997. I am now 18 years old. My hair was really long, I had to buy a navy blue rubber to tie it. I looked around my room. It was full of paintings. Paintings everywhere. I had bought two Japanese paintings on my trip to Kyoto three years earlier. I was on holiday there, and for reasons unbeknownst to me, I was drawn into the two paintings. The first painting is a wave. A blue, giant wave, with the edges spread like a giant monster’s hand. But, for some reasons, it had a calming effect to me. When I looked at that first painting, he felt as if he was in a timeless beach, with non-dangerous waves, just accompanying his eternity. The second painting was a giant rock that was shaped like the letter ‘U’. I could not grasp what the message of the painter was. Anyway, the giant rock that was shaped like the letter ‘U’ was really smooth, not like any other rocks I have seen in my life. Other rocks were always dented in the texture, never smooth. But in this second painting, the rock was totally smooth. Like someone had put it to a pottery machine and smoothened it.

One other painting that existed in my room was a copy of Vincent Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’. So, it was not exactly a ‘painting’, it was maybe better called as a ‘memory’. I truly cherished the fact that I have seen and taken the photograph the ‘Starry Night’ original painting. Because I really loved the painting, I printed the photograph that I had taken to a special kind of paper, close to a canvas. Therefore, I could feel alwas close with the painting.

Those three paintings inspired me to become a professional painter. I would like to continue Van Gogh, Picasso, and other legendary painters’ legacy. But maybe in the future, when people want to remember me, I will have something different. I lived in a totally different time and age, after all. Van Gogh painted in Van Gogh’s time, Picasso painted in Picasso’s time, and I painted in my time.

The only finished painting that I did was a painting that was called ‘beauty’. It was a portrait of a breathtakingly beautiful girl I had met in the underground subway in London a year ago. I was there to visit an art exposition. The girl and I exchanged a few words that day.

“Good morning to you”, I had said. It was in fact 10.24 in the morning of a Saturday.

“Good morning to you too”, she had answered with a warm smile.

She was wearing a red winter coat that covered her body through to the middle of her legs, a pink sweater inside it, and a magenta chino pants. An elegant pair of black leather shoes accompanied her feet.

She had told me that her name was Yvonne. She was apparently from the Netherlands. She spoke perfect English. She was an actor filming a new action movie in London. We talked a lot about movies and music. Her favorite movie was Breakfast at Tiffany’s.