Lisa

By Paul D Robertson

Charcoal and Chalk.

70 x 40cms

This was a birthday present for one of the people I am closest to in my life; Lisa.

She is beautiful and quite extraordinary and has a very cool dog.

I did this piece in one day as I had managed to forget her birthday the day before. I rubbed the skin from my fingers in trying to do it within an 8 hour period so that i could give it to her and get out of trouble. I try really hard NOT to give my work away as it is, you know, my LIVELIHOOD, but made a special exception in this case. Think it worked. Pretty sure she isn't mad at me any more.

Last letter to lisa:

Ah yes, late again my sweet and I lift my fingers to my lips and my thoughts wind around me in curls upon themselves, and it is your face that I see in the darkness before me. I think perhaps you are wild-fire, bright and beautiful and believing, leaving ashes and sweet smoke behind you, and who is it that does not turn to see, to look, at a fire, a light, in the dark of their lives. And in this you are like me. You know that.
There is some deep singing rhythm under our voices that turns people’s eyes from the inside of their heads and make them wish that they could really see. I think that it is a part and apart from our beauty, each of ours. Sweet smelling and weightless each in our cocoon of arrayed and arranged sense, here, HERE we go again.
Ah, yes. I think of you, I do. Too much, also, of course. I picture you, the things that you do, the softest touch of your hands, the strange sensuality of the soft muscular skin of your neck, the impenetrable hiss of your beautiful, perfect eyes. I imagine the things that you do, sometimes. I see you reading, turning a page, uncoiling your body and moving with the grace of an idea that has caught your mind in a carousel. The intensity of the fascination that you have for experience, each one. Running perhaps, showering, doing weird creative things with food, lifting a glass to your lips and sitting in odd masculine repose with unconscious feline strength. I pretend to see you. Sometimes I do. In a bath, naked and smiling dreamily, bubbles on your nose like a dope, drinking tea in a fit of existence, in a seizure of life.
As I probe the world in my staggered mismatched learning. As I burn the hours, exquisitely aware of the worn charm of moments. As I miss you. Yes.
I wonder at our difference… I am so afraid of so many things that for you seem to be more lush offerings to be eaten. And I am not afraid of some things, of few things, that I think drown you. I don’t think either of us has a choice.
And, yes, I think that we are both charmed, flipped with incense, majicked up, wearing luck and choice on a string around our throats. Skipping school. Getting away with it. Cross our palms and vacuum the corners of our rooms.
Liberty is a bitch bedded on a mattress of corpses. Someone French sad that. Robespierre. I think.
I envy you and I pity you, and I don’t know what it is you have chosen, and am too afraid to ever, ever ask. I am going to find some really BRIGHT golf pants and wear them EVERYWHERE and you’re not going to see.
That sucks.
You should get to see.

I want you to see.