Painting description

This painting is the last one I made before my thirtieth birthday. I spent a long time wondering what to paint for the occasion. What painting would be the crowning, the summary, the quintessence of my thirty years of life? How to put it, what frame to close it in, what commentary to wrap it with?! I found an answer to all those questions. It is: those are stupid questions. I don’t paint to look back. So I looked ahead, and there I saw how small the mountain on the horizon was, how many steps remained to reach it, how many paths and bends… there’s no time to look at the road behind me! So I picked the nearest obstacle and started overcoming it. Over forty shades of pink and yellow. Everything prepared in advance, so I wouldn’t have to mix paints afresh every day. More than 60 brushes in use after just two days of painting. All of that weighed heavily on me with each passing day. It felt as if I were bogging down in a tangle of hair, sinking into the texture of skin, and shuffling through a narrow valley of wrinkles, slower, and slower, and s l o w e r a n d… When I finished painting, I didn’t know whether what I’d painted was good. I lost my eye for the painting. I stopped seeing it. I had to catch my breath, paint something freehand, without worrying about the next stroke, just like that, straight from my head. I decided to paint a mandala. A few circles and lines of symmetry as a sketch, and the rest—anything goes! I darkened the studio and switched on the UV light. The girl’s lips in the painting began to glow—apparently the manufacturer used something nonstandard to produce the red paint. More glowing dots started to emerge from the walls and floor, each one fainter than the last. Eventually my eyes adjusted to the ultraviolet haze. White noise trickled from my headphones. I laid down more lines. At first quickly, deliberately, planning density and directions. With every quarter-hour, the gaps of unconsciousness grew. From brief flashes at the beginning to several-second holes in time. In those short moments my brain switched to a theta frequency—strange instants when you can listen to the machinery working behind the spotlights of the eyes. Short words, melodies, and indeterminate sounds—I could listen to them. I just had to be very quiet. I couldn’t know that I was listening. At such times it’s essential to be convinced that I am not my brain. Or perhaps I simply stand quietly in its seldom-visited corner, eavesdropping on the bustle of past and future stimuli. More lines. Longer. Slower. Unimportant. Some of them weren’t drawn by me. It’s like that feeling when you’re driving somewhere and suddenly realize you’ve already arrived, and you don’t really remember the way (I hope I’m not the only one who drives like that; if I am, I should hand in my license). And so the mandala was painted. Partly deliberately, and partly unconsciously. It was the last stretch of the road to the milestone reading THIRTY YEARS OF LIFE. I didn’t look back. I look confidently ahead.